


Very Dark Magic

by bomberqueen17



Series: Trust [6]
Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Aiden Lives (The Witcher), Canon-Typical Violence, Depersonalization, Mind Control, Other, Suicide mention, fundamental violations of bodily autonomy, mentions of noncon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-10
Updated: 2020-12-22
Packaged: 2021-03-09 22:22:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 23,683
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27993699
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bomberqueen17/pseuds/bomberqueen17
Summary: Aiden's had a rough couple of... however long it's been.
Series: Trust [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2048918
Comments: 260
Kudos: 254





	1. Discerning Tastes

**Author's Note:**

> So, alert readers have put together the fact that [Anoke](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anoke/pseuds/Anoke/works?fandom_id=299357) is beta-reading this, and that I’ve collaborated with them on a bunch of [other stuff](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25895626) in this series, _and_ they’ve got [their own Aiden Lives story](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25129732), featuring Aiden having been salvaged nearly-dead and sold to a mage for Nefarious Experimentation, and are wondering if this is leading into a surprise collab on that! And the answer is... no but why didn’t we do that, it would’ve been smart. Still. No. They’ve got some plan I don’t yet know about for the ending of their story [Fair Trade](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25129732), and honestly I’m really enjoying not beta-reading that one so I don’t actually have any idea what that ending’s going to be (I _am_ beta-reading some other ones and that’s also fun, don’t get me wrong, I’m just delighted by not having any idea what’s coming, variety being the spice of life &c &c). You should go read it, I think there’s another update coming soon and the sequel’s, like, imminent.
> 
> So no, this is a Yay Two Cakes scenario, and I have, with permission, just wholesale copied their homework on how Aiden could have survived-- I’ve adopted a nearly-identical scenario wholesale and am treating that as canon because they worked it out in pretty good detail and I’m one hundred percent convinced. 
> 
> And it’s more fun this way, _and_ we get two cakes. (Please, go... read... the other... cake? this got away from me. And like. Leave nice comments. So they update the end sooner. LOL. Listen we're all having a hard time lately and we all deserve nice things and I am dying to know what's going to happen in that story.)  
> In _this_ story I was more interested in investigating the dynamics of everyone dealing with the consequences of the situation; they're doing a whole thing with What Aiden Did On His ~~Summer Vacation~~ Magical Enthrallment. So that’s where we’re going with this, separately but in cahoots.
> 
> * * *
> 
> Now: WARNINGS!!!!!!!: mention of suicide attempt, eye trauma, mind control, depersonalization, heavy shit, and the glimmer of comfort is well over the horizon line at this point.
> 
> * * *

He spent a lot of his time in a kind of fog, unaware of the passage of time, unaware of his surroundings. He’d fought it, for a while, but by now he no longer had the strength or the hope. He didn’t know how long it had taken him to give up, but he was defeated now; he’d never made the slightest headway against the controls and compulsions on him, had never been able to surface even for a moment once they were upon him.

She left his mind free sometimes, when she had him caged, and he’d return to awareness and stare hopelessly up at the distant window. He’d spent a lot of those stretches of time, early on, trying desperately to put together what he knew, where he was, to figure out how long it had been, to come up with a way to escape or at least to connect in some way to the real world.

He’d studied that distant window intently, analyzed every aspect of the light, of the sounds, of the scents that came through it. He’d pieced together wildlife, seasons, surroundings.

None of it mattered.

He knew this: fucking Karadin had hunted him down for the bounty that fucking count had put on him, and his last free memory was of his adrenaline response kicking in on that fight. Obviously it hadn’t been enough to save him, and he’d woken up… well he’d never really woken up. Everything since then was either this cage, or the hazy blur of mental control spells.

Clearly, Karadin or someone working with him had managed to keep him alive. They’d taken his swords and medallion for the bounty, probably; those were gone. But they’d sold him, apparently not quite dead, to…

She said her name was Halmatia. She looked like a beautiful young woman. She was clearly a sorceress. And she was capricious and demanding and casually cruel. It amused her to have him as a pet. She’d healed him reasonably well, and for the most part kept him well-fed and clean and well turned-out, with notable exceptions. He’d lost an eye in the fight with Karadin, and she’d done various horrible experiments to replace it, most of which hadn’t worked.

But for a while now, when he was aware enough to notice it, he did have some degree of vision on that side. He avoided looking at himself, so he didn’t know what she’d replaced his eye with, but he could see, more or less.

She left him alone for days at a time, safely imprisoned; long enough that he’d attempted everything reasonable to escape, and some unreasonable things. At one point he’d managed to damage himself enough to send himself into an adrenaline-response rage, but he didn’t know how much he’d actually achieved by it; a very long period of fuzziness had followed, and the next time he was aware enough, he had a new cage in the same spot, with all new furnishings and fewer of them, and all his fingernails were growing back and he had a few new scars.

But he didn’t know what had really happened.

She’d obtained him for a series of experiments, which had been horrific, but after an indeterminate period that couldn’t have been very long (he told himself), she’d clearly wrung as much data out of him as she genuinely needed. So, after that, she had to find ways to use him. So she used him for errands, tried to use him for assassinations, used him for guard duty, used him for various tasks. He had derived some grim satisfaction from realizing that she needed to control him with such heavy spells that she couldn’t use him for anything truly sensitive, because he couldn’t access any of his true skills or abilities without having some access to his free will.

But it meant he spent most of his time under her control, and consequently had no real notion of how much time had passed. He had no way to measure the time; he didn’t age, and his body didn’t change anymore since his first attempts to starve himself. She’d just compel him to eat, to practice his sword-forms, to do whatever he had to do to maintain his physique, so he was in perfectly normal condition and had no access to any means of self-destruction.

(There had been one determined attempt, with teeth. She’d filed his teeth down, while he was unconscious in the aftermath. They’d later fallen out, one by one. She had noticed that they grew back, but hadn’t ever done anything with that knowledge. It was one, very small, mercy.)

For a time, he thought it would benefit him to pretend to comply, to play a longer game and feign obedience in return for greater freedom. He’d made an attempt, had cajoled and wheedled, had swallowed down reluctance in the face of hideous interpersonal provocation on her part, and had spent several months walking around with far fewer compulsions on him, feigning willingness to do her bidding. But all that had gotten him was an assassination job, and while it had clearly been solely to test his loyalty, he still hadn’t been able to make himself go through with it or convincingly fake it when she’d sent him out to bring her the head of an enemy’s young child.

He couldn’t do it, couldn’t even pretend, and she’d expected that and had immediately tightened her control spells down. Perhaps that was the worst part; he’d come to himself in the cage with the child’s head sitting just on the other side of the bars watching him, and in his dim memories he knew he’d put it there himself.

He had no idea how long ago that had been. He hadn’t offered her the slightest obedience since. She had no finer feelings, no sense of justice, no pity for any other living creatures. Under her control he did hideous things, but none of them were of his volition, and he clung to that scant comfort during his few moments of lucidity. She couldn’t use him to anything like his potential, and he comforted himself with that as well; if her control were finer, he could be overthrowing kings for her, but as it was, he was occasionally an unsubtle way of frightening enemies, primarily a decorative object in her home, and rather often, a brute force way for her to harvest useful monster parts for the other horrifying things she was experimenting upon in other parts of the basement where he lived.

He knew she had other sentients. He smelled an elf, intermittently, faint and fading. There was a human, frightened and suffering. He heard a man, screaming, and after that the human scent didn’t come again. There were intermittent scents of creatures too, a succubus perhaps, a sylvan-- things that could talk. She was practicing her control spells, honing her ability to dominate thinking beings; Aiden had to stop her, but there was nothing he could do. She never left him a chance.

Sometimes she sent him out on more mundane errands. For some reason it seemed to amuse her to have him do her shopping. She could use his sense of smell for that; compelling him to pick out only the most potent herbs for cooking or magic was within what she could do without letting him free enough to pry himself loose.

He was out one day, a single unexceptional day in the long indeterminate haze of his captivity, going mechanically about the business of buying dried herbs. He was in a smallish city; he had no idea which one. It was daytime, and it was winter or early spring. He seemed to attract little attention, or didn’t notice if he did; she had him in a hooded cloak and he didn’t notice what else; it didn’t matter. He walked mechanically, spoke little, handed over money, put purchases into the bag she’d given him for the purpose. Once upon a time he would have spent the whole time straining against the control spells, trying to eke out additional glances, trying to work out where he was, trying like hell to make some sort of expression at a passer-by, something to make someone notice him, but he’d long since given up; it only ever got him looked at oddly, and he never made any dent.

There was another customer in the store and he had to wait. She was buying similar herbs; she was probably a cunning-woman or witch herself. Sometimes he had thought that if he could get the attention of another mage or sorcerer, they would help him, but he’d met several by now, he fuzzily thought, and none of them had seemed to care. He didn’t remember if any of them had realized what she’d done to enslave him. He didn’t remember, but he knew it didn’t matter.

The shop proprietress had to go into the back to get something for the woman ahead of him, so he stood placidly to wait. She glanced over at him; she looked young, and was pretty, turned-out a bit fancier than a cunning-woman or hedgewitch normally would be. She might well be a mage. It didn’t matter; he disregarded it, as it didn’t concern him. “Sorry,” she said, “I always do ask for strange things.”

He didn’t answer. The control spell had a few scripted answers it would compel him to say so that he wouldn’t fail at social interactions, but there wasn’t one for this, so he just let it pass, and stared blankly at the assortment of herbs.

The woman was still looking at him. If she said anything the spell would likely make him respond; Halmatia had caught on to his attempts to attract attention, over time, and had built in a few more layers of social interaction. “Pardon me,” she said, and her voice was friendly, “but-- are you a Witcher?”

“Not anymore,” he said dully, lest the control spell force some polite nonsense out of him.

“I didn’t think that was something you could stop doing,” she said, surprised. He didn’t try to make eye contact, in case the control spell would prevent him, and shrugged, since there was no script for this. She took a half-step closer, and whispered, “That explains it. It’s you, isn’t it?”

That made no sense at all. He couldn’t tell what she was looking at. Probably his eye. He didn’t know what it looked like but he knew people recoiled from it if they noticed, so he didn’t make a lot of eye contact. He flicked a glance up at her, knowing better than to hope for anything. “Rude to stare,” he said, which was one of the compulsion’s scripted responses and said a lot about Halmatia’s approach to manners. Mages were telepathic, he’d learned to his sorrow long ago, so he added a bonus unspoken _Please kill me_ to see if she’d hear it.

Her eyes widened slightly: she did. “Sweet Melitele,” she said softly. “Who’s done this to you?”

They were so far off a script that he had to tread carefully, lest the control spell declare the errand failed and force him to walk away. “Pardon me,” he said, from the script, and with all his might thought _Halmatia, I only know her as Halmatia, please kill me, I can’t get free_.

It was too much and he had to take a deep breath and look down to calm himself, before he did anything the control spells would pick up on. His hands were shaking, but they did that a lot.

The shop proprietress came back out into the room with a heavy sigh and set her burden down with a rustle. “I’ve only a little left, there’s been much demand for it.”

The woman who’d been speaking to him turned back to her. “Quality’s not fantastic,” she said, as if she hadn’t been talking to him at all.

“No,” the proprietress conceded, “but I can’t restock it until it comes into bloom again, won’t be another three or four months at the earliest. I asked around, nobody else in town has any either, or I’d have bought some.”

“Mm,” the woman said. She glanced over at him. “What do you think, would it suit?”

The control spells twitched, but didn’t have any required actions for that kind of stimulus. Still, to keep them from kicking in, he made a noncommittal noise, a little twitch of a frown. _Please_ , he thought hope fading. _Please, I don’t know how long it’s been. I can’t keep on like this. Please kill me. Please do something. Please._

“This one’s not on your shopping list, is it?” she asked, and her face was more solemn than the subject matter suggested.

That, he could answer. “Calendula,” he said, “St. John’s Root, ageratum.”

“So,” she said, “no.” She turned back to the proprietress. “Do you know this guy? How’s his taste?” Her tone was teasing.

The proprietress eyed him. “Something’s wrong with him,” she said, “but he has very discerning tastes. I don’t know who he’s buying for, but whoever they are, they’re doing _very_ dark magic.”

“That they are,” the woman said. “Well, I’ll just take the buglewort and peony roots, for now. I’ve a friend I can ask to look farther afield for the rest. Not to be picky, but this just won’t answer my needs in its current state, it won’t have enough of the volatile oils still in it.”

He let himself sink back down further under the spells. Hoping she would take an interest in him enough to interfere had been a wild experiment, but as ever, hope was exhausting and he’d lost the knack for it. He let his mind wander in the thick fog as she finished collecting her purchases and paying for them.

 _Please_ , he thought after her, forlornly and much less intently, as she left the shop, and she glanced over her shoulder at him with lingering interest before she pushed out through the door.

He sank down into despair and paid no attention as his body let the control spells prompt him through filling the shopping list, numbly accepting whatever change the shopkeeper gave him from his payment, and stowing the purchases carelessly. He could intervene to do a better job, but why bother?

He went out of the shop and let the spells take him toward the next stop, and it was only when someone touched his arm and the control spells wrung out an “excuse me” and adjustment in stride that he blinked back to enough awareness to see the woman from the shop.

“What’s your name?” she said quietly.

“Nothing,” he said, rote, compelled. _I had a name_ , he thought fiercely. He hadn’t even thought of it in so long now, he’d nearly forgotten, but his name was-- Aiden. _Aiden. Aiden. I’m Aiden._

She blinked, expression turning intent. “What school?” she asked.

“Nothing,” he said again, letting the spell answer for him. _Cat_ , he thought, and couldn’t stop from repeating it. _Cat, cat, cat-- do you know someone? Do you know me? Do you know--_ He was getting agitated. He made himself calm down. “Excuse me,” he said again, letting the control spell churn through its rote responses.

She let go of his arm. “Of course,” she said. “You just-- reminded me, of someone.” And she gestured lightly-- she _was_ a mage, it was a spell-- an illusion spell.

A little illusion floated above her hand, sheltered from the view of the street by her body-- an image. It was-- ah, it was _Lambert_ , gesturing as he talked, and then throwing his head back a little in laughter, and Aiden stared at it in naked longing, completely transfixed. Lambert. Oh, by the Gods, he’d-- that had been his life, and he hadn’t even let himself think of it in so long, it had been buried deep down with his name. A little noise came out of his throat, without his volition, circumventing the compulsions. _Lambert_.

“You _do_ know him,” she said. “He thinks you’re dead.”

Aiden wanted very badly to say Lambert’s name, to ask this woman how she knew him, when she’d seen him-- was he alive? Was he well? Where was he? Could she take him there? But he couldn’t free his mouth enough to say any of that. He wanted to sob, to cry, to run away. He wanted-- it had been so long since he’d wanted anything with more than a dull ache, it was agonizingly painful. _Tell him_ , he started to think, but there was no end of that sentence. Tell him what? “Nothing,” he said out loud, because it was one of the words he could access. _Help me,_ he thought, which wasn’t the sort of thing he’d even remembered he could think, but-- _Help me, please, help me_.

She frowned seriously, and gestured with one hand, and he felt the control spells come up and prepare to swallow him, but they didn’t. She was holding off. She was-- she was _looking_ at them, he realized, examining the threads that surrounded and engulfed him. “This is some nasty work,” she murmured. Her eyes moved over him, then locked onto his eyes. “Is she watching now? Does she watch all you do?”

 _I can’t do anything she doesn’t want_ , he thought. _There’s nothing for her to watch_.

“She can make you tell about this when you get back, though,” the woman said, eyes wandering over him again. “Hm.” She looked back directly into his face. “I can’t help you right this moment but now I know. I’ll come for you. Stay strong.”

He wished again that he could cry. _What year is it_ , he asked, forlorn.

“It’s 1273,” she said. “I need to go, before she catches on. I’ll come for you.”

 _Who are you_ , he thought. 1273. The last year he remembered was-- 1270. Fuck. Summer of 1270. Lambert had thought he was dead for three years. He _had_ been dead, he _was_ dead, he couldn’t--

“If I don’t tell you, you can’t be forced to tell Halmatia,” the woman said grimly. “Just be strong, Aiden,” she finished, and turned away.

Aiden stood stock-still for a long moment, his name reverberating through him. He remembered it. He had a name. Someone knew he was alive.

He couldn’t afford to hope she’d come for him. But someone knew, at least, out in the world.

He sank back down under the compulsions and paid no attention to the rest of the errand, not even the portal travel at the end of it. It wasn’t until he was safely released into his dingy basement cave that he lay down on his pallet in the corner and pulled out the memory of the woman’s little illusion and looked at it in his mind’s eye.

Lambert. Laughing, pleased with himself; a little blurry but Aiden could see he was in his shirtsleeves, swordless, well-groomed, at rest. Gods, he looked like he’d just scored a conversational point, perhaps, bested someone in a verbal match.

Lambert had thought he was dead for three years, now. But he looked good and he was, if not happy, at least satisfied, somewhere. Good, Aiden thought-- _good_ , this world could still be a good place if Lambert was alive somewhere in it.

Without the control spells, he could weep, so he did, until he fell asleep.

* * *

Aiden clung fiercely to his name and to that new secondhand memory of Lambert whenever he was alone, but took great care at emptying his mind and seeming to drift in fog as normal whenever Halmatia was nearby. It wouldn’t do for her to notice any change in him.

In his lonely nights he was certain it wouldn’t amount to anything. He would never see the other mage again. She’d had lovely changeable hazel eyes and strong handsome features and if she’d been in a position to capture that kind of image of Lambert they must be friends. Probably good friends, if she had captured that image and kept it. Nobody who didn’t really like Lambert would find that particular expression of his so charming they’d want to review it; he only laughed like that when he felt he was winning.

It was bittersweet to think about Lambert, really, both to think about the times they’d had together-- so many years, but so short a time at any particular stretch, and with so many interruptions-- and to think about what he must be doing now. Palling around with quick-witted mages…

For the first time in a long time Aiden managed to daydream a little, remembering a particular evening, warm with drink and companionship, and Lambert, drunk and mostly nude, in his lap, wearing nothing but a frilly apron and a lot of eyeliner, holding forth on various topics--

That, in retrospect, had possibly been the best night of Aiden’s life. There had been good food, as well, and other friends present for some of it, and the others had drifted off to bed and Aiden had been alone with Lambert and had taken that stupid frilly apron off him and, well, it had been a wonderful evening and a pleasant night and the hangover had been worth it.

Perhaps he should have been jealous, thinking of Lambert moving on with his life and leaving him here, but Lambert thought he was dead. Lambert did not cope well with tragedy. Aiden had worried about him, had worried about grief making him reckless; Lambert was smart and canny but he sometimes had trouble with impulse control. But, clearly, he’d survived the loss of Aiden, and moved on, and had new friends, and Aiden couldn’t find any space to be other than wistfully happy about it. Gods, if Lambert were dead-- well, that had been a lot of his nightmares.

A world with Lambert in it was still a good one, even if Aiden weren’t in it.

Aiden was too beaten-down to even remember being a person who had liked sex. Even remembering the time he’d bought Lambert a pair of decorative shoes, very femme high-heeled mules that had fit him perfectly, and then fucked him in nothing but the shoes, didn’t stir more than a vague kind of warmth in his midsection. Mostly what he remembered was how simultaneously embarrassed and delighted Lambert had been about the whole thing, and his whole combined sense of amusement and wonder and-- surely he’d been scorchingly turned-on through most of it, but that had faded in recollection, and mostly it was the delight that lingered.

He couldn’t imagine Lambert in the shoes with the mage. She was pretty, though, and in a way that Lambert would probably like. Probably. He didn’t remember how these things worked.

He slept a little, and then woke in that timeless gray space, and anxiously paced for a while, four paces up, four paces across, four paces back, climbed the bars and did pull-ups from the upper bars to burn off some of the energy, dropped and paced some more, eventually realized that some of his agitation was that he hadn’t eaten in probably two days now, and forced himself to sit still and try to meditate.

Halmatia forgot to feed him sometimes. He usually had enough water in the cage with him to see him through, but she’d forgotten about that a couple of times too. If he meditated he could go longer without either, but he was keenly aware she could absolutely kill him like this, and might well do that. Despite his plea to the mage, most of the time he wasn’t willing to take death as his only escape, but, well. If it was the only escape possible… He couldn’t look forward to it.

He was too agitated to meditate, but after trying for long enough that his legs cramped up, he heard the distant sounds of movement that meant someone was approaching. He came keenly to attention, kneeling motionless in the corner, and listened to the footfalls.

It was Halmatia, he knew it was her by the rhythm of her walk. She was in court shoes, the heels clacking on the stone floor. He had no idea what the political situation was, whether she were involved in some court or other-- it was 1273, he had no idea whether there was war again, or peace, or-- he hadn’t done any close observation of the people around him, had no real concept of what was going on. But she went to parties sometimes, brought him as a decoration and bodyguard, sometimes made him kill people, and he unfailingly spent the whole thing as a mindless puppet rather than be subject to her whims in any way he really had to live through.

(Sometimes there was sex. Orgies and things. His body was made to participate, but he made himself sink so far down under the spells he couldn’t even see out his own eyes. He had no idea what his body had done without him, and no interest in knowing. She hadn’t done it many times, though; he got the impression that his performance, as a puppet, was underwhelming. He wasn’t going to ask. He didn’t want to know. He also privately thought that since he’d never bothered objecting she didn’t find it all that amusing to use him like that.)

She came down the final corridor and opened the door. “Hungry, dearest Igor?” she trilled.

She called him whatever name she felt like. He wasn’t sure she knew his real name. He was just as happy with her not knowing. For a while he’d been Wulfstan. He’d stopped paying attention; she usually updated the control spells with whatever his name was so they’d make him react, and that was fine. He didn’t have to pay attention.

He didn’t answer, because the control spells weren’t in place to make him do so. She didn’t need him to. “I’m sorry I couldn’t come down earlier with your din-din, I was busy. But you must be _starving_ , pet. Here.”

She brought the tray over to his cage and unfastened the catch to slide it through the slot. A time or two he’d lunged at her through it, but he wasn’t interested today. He knew it didn’t do any good but it was worth the inevitable reprisals to see her annoyance and startlement every time.

“Eat up,” she said, “we have an engagement tonight! Will you get dressed on your own or do I have to make you?”

He rarely looked at her anymore, but he gave her an assessing look now. She was dressed as if for a court function. A party, then. She likely wouldn’t leave him enough control for him to eat at a fancy party, so he picked up the tray and brought it over to the corner farthest from his latrine so he could eat.

“Been a while since you let me wash,” he pointed out. “Or is that the aesthetic you’re going for, tonight?”

He rarely spoke directly to her, so she mostly ignored him in return. She blinked a little now. “Do you want a bath?”

He shrugged. He genuinely didn’t care. He wouldn’t be present. He ate methodically instead of considering it. He didn’t care about that either but he didn’t want to be weak from hunger.

There it was-- hope. He hadn’t admitted it to himself, but he was hoping there’d be a reason for him not to be weak from hunger. But he genuinely didn’t care if he smelt of stress and fear-sweat and deprivation the whole time he drifted hazily behind the mage at some fancy party, that wasn’t anything he cared about.

Hope was a foolish extravagance, but it was a nice change. He’d let it string him along a little, he decided. As she settled the control spells onto him, he chewed and swallowed the last of the food and sank down, but stayed there, a little under the surface, watching as she navigated his puppet body through the preparations for the event.

So he was paying attention, somewhat, to the proceedings, as they arrived at the noble house. What nation, he had no idea, what kind of noble he didn’t know either; some sort of manor, finely turned-out, mostly non-mages but a fair handful of mages as well. There were a lot of Nilfgaardians, distinctive in dress and accent. What that meant politically, he couldn’t begin to guess. It was 1273, and he’d lost three years, and he just plain didn’t know. It didn’t matter.

He was dressed in something brocade, and he had no swords but had a long decorative knife. He hadn’t bothered looking at it. It probably wasn’t good for much. He also probably had illusions on him; she liked to make him look outlandish. She didn’t worry about anyone recognizing him and he wasn’t sure if she ever had, if it had occurred to her that Witchers knew one another, that there would have been people who had cared to find him. As it happened, no one had, so it hadn’t mattered.

There was a ballroom; of course there was a ballroom. Was this royal? No royals he recognized. No one at all he-- mm maybe that older man, richly-dressed, who had just gone by, but in order to give him a closer look Aiden would have had to wrest control of at least his head from the control spells and he wasn’t ready to make that kind of effort. So he rode along blankly, vaguely taking in the decorations-- no, he hadn’t been in this manor house before, no it surely wasn’t a royal residence unless fashions had changed a great deal-- and the fact that there were, huh, an _awful lot_ of Nilfgaardians here made him wonder how many wars he’d missed.

Clearly, there wasn’t a war on now.

Halmatia made genuinely stifling conversation with a number of people and he did not bother to listen. She wasn’t a mover or a shaker, he had figured that out; she was a hanger-on, with some independent wealth so she wasn’t reliant on anyone for patronage, but with no real influence of her own. Either she wasn’t powerful enough or the things she worked on weren’t of any general interest, or-- he didn’t know, but he had amused himself in the past by observing that she always had to approach other people to make conversation, no one of importance came to her.

“-- just the usual,” a self-important kind of man was saying, “nobody in particular has--”

“Oh,” the woman next to the self-important man interrupted. She was looking toward the entrance. “Now _there’s_ someone different.”

“Who?” Halmatia demanded, turning with absolutely no subtlety to look. Around the room, other people had done the same, and a hush swept around and was replaced with low murmuring conversations.

Aiden considered wrestling back control to look, but the control spell blindly followed Halmatia’s example and turned him that way, saving him the effort. “--Lodge of Sorceresses,” someone nearby hissed, and he blinked at the woman who had just walked into the room with the theatrical sweep of skirts of someone who’d come to be looked at.

It was the woman from the herb shop.

She wasn’t dressed plainly now. No hood, no cloak, she was in a sleeveless gown, cut low down her chest to show off her sternum and an impossible view of the sides of her breasts, the dress elaborately embroidered and swept high into a collar behind, with a full skirt. She had blonde hair and alabaster skin and -- hazel eyes, which briefly swept right across him, paused, and blinked before moving on-- and she was certainly wearing illusions but there was no disguising the sheer power that rolled off her. She was a sorceress, a powerful one, and Halmatia said,

“Keira Metz! I thought she was dead.”

By chance it fell into a lull, and the sorceress heard her; it wasn’t that large a room, which was how Aiden had surmised it wasn’t a royal residence.

Keira turned and looked at Halmatia, and her expression dipped briefly into a frown before smoothing back out into a pleasant-fake-polite smile. Aiden figured it out immediately: Halmatia was wearing a very similar style of gown, cut very similarly though less artfully and not quite as daringly in the front, and had her hair styled similarly and had lately taken to wearing it blonde as well.

“No,” Keira said, “I’m not dead, as it happens-- I’m sorry, you look familiar, but I can’t recollect your name?”

“It’s Halmatia,” Halmatia said, “Halmatia Heltzenfaff? I was a few years behind you at Aretuza.”

Keira blinked, smile going more fixed. “Of course,” she said, and it was painfully obvious she didn’t know her. Her eyes flickered to Aiden. “And-- your escort?”

“This is,” Halmatia said, “--Ivan,” and Aiden would have rolled his eyes if he could, but he settled for just watching. Keira didn’t seem to recognize him. Whatever illusions Halmatia had over him were probably preventing it. His heart sank, which took some doing, as it hadn’t been very high to begin with.

Mages could read minds, so of course Halmatia could, so if he tried to think anything at Keira it would be as if he’d just said it out loud. Still, it might be worth the risk.

“--Ivan,” Keira said, managing to mock Halmatia’s little hesitation without doing anything overt. Her eyebrows went up and she quirked her head. “Do you have a dramatic backstory, --Ivan?” She said the name with humorous emphasis again, incorporating Halmatia’s little hesitation.

“He doesn’t talk,” Halmatia said, just as the control spell kicked out a noncommittal “hmm” from him. “He has a very involved and traumatic backstory, as it happens.”

“Yes,” Aiden agreed, using the control spell’s script with far more glee than he ever had before.

Keira’s eyebrows went up and she nodded, polite smile strained into obviously hiding laughter. “That’s very coherent,” she said.

“Well,” Halmatia snapped, blushing, “he talks _sometimes_. Just apparently never when I want him to.”

“Sometimes our escorts are sore trials to us,” Keira said warmly, amused, though it was clear she was amused at Halmatia’s expense, not on her behalf, “which is why I came to this party alone. My would-be escort has a terrible temper and I just can’t trust him around people.”

That sounded-- Aiden very badly wanted to prompt her to tell more about her escort. He got as far as raising his head, but he couldn’t find a corner where the control spells weren’t carefully overlapped. But Keira looked at him and winked, and he thought-- _maybe_?

She moved off, after that, and Halmatia swirled bad-temperedly around the party. Aiden’s long-dormant analytical brain woke up and noted that Halmatia’s name suggested she was a noble, and her demeanor suggested she was a spoiled rich bitch who despite being a mage had never done anything genuinely important, and he knew he’d thought these things before but thinking them had never amounted to anything so he’d not bothered recollecting them.

He thought instead about Keira Metz, whose name he _had_ heard. She’d been an advisor to Foltest at one point. She’d been involved at Thanedd, surely, and he knew she’d been involved in destroying Stygga Castle-- not that he’d still been concerned with the abandoned old ruin, surely, but-- it mattered, somewhere. She was in with Philippa Eilheart and some of those other really terrifying sorceresses, he was sure of it. He remembered her, remembered her gravity-defying tits and her penchant, at least in legend, for brass knuckles.

What would she be doing with Lambert? How would she even _know_ him, Lambert was horribly suspicious of mages, though from what he said this was because he knew so many of them and spent so much time with them.

Obviously, Aiden didn’t know enough to figure any of this out, but speculating was far more interesting than what he normally did at parties like these, which was to pretend he wasn’t there.

Halmatia seized him by the arm at one point and shook him slightly. “Don’t think I didn’t notice that,” she hissed. “That wink. You know the illusion makes you look much more attractive than you are.”

Aiden would have laughed, but while he could see the control spells were loose at one edge, he knew that was bait, by now. So he gave her the normal dead-eyed control-spell reflex look, and let the control spell spit out something suitably adoring.

“You’re pretending,” she hissed, which was perceptive of her, except that she’d hissed that sort of accusation at him before and it seemed to have no bearing on what he was actually trying to do.

 _You really flatter yourself that I’d bother_ , he thought at her, and she recoiled slightly and her artificially-pretty face contorted in rage. So, she could hear him after all. But just then someone came up next to her-- someone who could not have more obviously been profoundly unimportant, from the shabby tastelessness of their finery and the degree of their pretentious bluster, and she had to paste on a smile and take what social recognition she could get.

Aiden trailed after her, watching keenly behind his bored-indolent illusion of an expression. Metz was in the corner of the room with the woman he realized must be the host of the party, and they were gracefully ignoring peoples’ attempts at conversational inputs.

“She’s been in hiding, for _years_ ,” a woman murmured behind her fan, behind him. “Rumor had it she’d been taken by witch-hunters.”

“No, I had it from a friend of Dandelion’s, Geralt of Rivia got her out of there,” another voice said.

“Witchers and sorceresses, hm?” said another voice.

“I think it’s just that one Witcher, really,” a third voice said, amused.

“Oh speaking of Witchers! I heard from a friend who trades in Kaedwen that the Witcher fortress up there is finally abandoned!”

“Wasn’t it cleared out decades ago?”

“Apparently not completely, but there was a big fight last year,” and Aiden almost tried to turn his head, but he knew the speaker was too far away for him to focus on. “Said the last survivor came down out of the hills and told the villagers the fortress was vacant now, suggested they wait a few years before trying to go up there and scavenge anything.”

“Last survivor! That sounds dire.”

Kaer Morhen was the old Witcher fortress in Kaedwen. Aiden had been there once, as a child, during training, and then never had gone back, never had gone with Lambert, never wanted to try his luck. He knew it was mostly in ruins after the pogrom half a century ago, but he knew the last few Wolves still trekked back there every winter, and the one old one still lived there all the time. _Big fight. Last survivor._

He had no hope of putting it together, and no hope of asking any questions, and he let go for a little while and followed Halmatia around blindly, and at some point she was hissing accusations at him and he felt her probing around for his defiance, felt her surprise when she couldn’t find it.

“Well, I suppose her making her re-debut like this is a sign they’ve truly done away with most of the witch-hunters’ power, then.”

“If it takes having an Emperor to stop that reign of terror, it may well be worth it.”

An Emperor. Aiden put that together with the number of Nilfgaardians, and came up with a conclusion that rather boggled the mind, but might be actually true: had Nilfgaard _won_? Had he not only missed another war, but missed a defeat on that scale? It didn’t bear much thinking about.

And had dire personal implications; from what he understood, Nilfgaard was sympathetic to non-humans, but had little need for Witchers. He wasn’t sure what they did instead, but-- even if he ever got free, his way of life might be done with. Was _that_ what the fight had been, up at Kaer Morhen? But he couldn’t understand Nilfgaard having the manpower to spare for it, at such a distance. It couldn’t be. And anyway-- no, surely not.

Well, it was a moot speculation, as from what he could tell, Metz didn’t recognize him, and had no intention to free him. The wink had likely just been to infuriate Halmatia.

Unless it hadn’t been. Unless-- but he couldn’t possibly ask her, couldn’t possibly get her attention in any way. There was nothing he could do.

He sank back under the spells and did not notice when they left the party.


	2. Specimen

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: The usual, plus denial of food that tips over into kind of an eating disorder. Be gentle with yourselves about this, it's a rough time of year and a rough situation. Mention of offscreen noncon too. And there's some violence, but it's gonna be offscreen for the rough stuff.

He’d nearly forgotten his name again. It took effort to remember it. He’d stopped eating, partly because she kept “forgetting” to feed him, and partly because it just seemed futile. That worked at making her stop her stupid little power game of withholding his food, which he knew was about that other mage winking at him at the party. That other mage… he had imagined the entire encounter, he hadn’t seen her elsewhere, that hadn’t been real.

But going on an informal hunger strike and refusing to eat the meal she brought him after what his body told him was probably three days without eating meant that when she came on the fourth day, she realized she had to use a control spell to make him eat, and then he was under control spells for an indeterminate period but at least when they finally dropped off, he took stock and realized he was at least well-hydrated and his ribs weren’t showing.

Well, that was good, he didn’t want to be starved.

Or maybe he did. He didn’t know anymore.

She brought him out, under the control spells, to roam the house, which had once been a welcome change of scenery but now just made him tired. She’d make him talk to visitors, or entertain guests at an orgy, or kill someone, or take part in some horrid experiment, or she’d try to bait him, or… there were so many possibilities, and none of them were pleasant.

He drifted around as the control spells piloted him from room to room according to the scripted actions, and paid no mind. At some point she’d made him bathe, at another had dressed him, and the only thing that made him blink any awareness into his gaze was noticing that she’d dressed him like a Witcher, in his own clothes-- well, in ones similar to them. These were-- there were decorative panels on the leather trousers, it was somewhat odd. He wandered the house like a ghost in a costume of his former self, wondering vaguely if visitors were coming or if she just felt nostalgic.

And then the mage walked in, the one from the herb shop, the one from the party. Keira Metz. She was following Halmatia, who was ostentatiously showing her around the place. Over Halmatia’s shoulder, she looked at him, and winked again. He blinked in return, one of the scripted actions the spells let him do. He couldn’t react any other way without struggling, and he was too surprised to make the effort.

“Now, this,” Keira said, “is a specimen! Where did you get him?”

“I got him damaged,” Halmatia said, “and had to do some repairs, but he’s better than new now.”

“That eye,” Keira said, coming closer and looking at him. She touched Halmatia’s shoulder. “You simply _must_ show me your notes. Is that Vilgefortz’s technique? But he never managed to make it work that well, did he?”

“It is,” Halmatia said. “Ah, some of my innovations are secret-- but I can give you enough of the basic information that you could make it work as well.”

“I would just,” Keira said, “love that.” She looked into his face again. “Say, your Witcher talks a lot less than mine.”

“Ah,” Halmatia said, managing to sound regretful. “The nature of the damage, when I acquired him-- well, let’s just say he would have died. I got… he’s all still there, but he has, ah. Difficulty with emotional self-regulation, let’s just say. I have to keep him under control spells, or in a cage.”

Aiden would have gritted his teeth. It took everything he had not to loudly think _lies_ at her, but he managed not to. As it was, he glared at her.

“That’s a shame,” Keira said. “Now-- ah, I had heard something of that. Some of the different Witcher schools, they had different types of mutations-- I had read, something, somewhere. Now, which school is he from?”

“Ah,” Halmatia said, hesitating. “Is it important?”

“Well, if we know his age and his school, then we’ll know which mutations he has, specifically,” Keira said. “My Witcher, for example, is from the Wolf School, and he underwent his mutations around 1183 or 4 sometime, which means the mage was a man named Hieronymous. He was fairly conservative, didn’t innovate too wildly, but he did occasionally experiment with mutating subjects more than once.”

Lambert. She was talking about Lambert. It took everything Aiden had not to react, not to think too loudly. It sounded like she was discussing him as a _collector piece_ , or a pedigreed animal, not a person. Was she keeping him as a pet as well? Did she have him under this many control spells? His heart went cold, stomach clenching.

“Is it true the Wolf School are all dead except one survivor?” Halmatia asked.

“No,” Keira said, “it’s not. So tell me, you don’t know what school he’s from?”

“Cat,” Halmatia admitted suspiciously. So she _did_ know; she never mentioned it, like his name. She might genuinely not know his name. He’d come to with no medallion, so he’d thought perhaps she didn’t know his school either.

“And how old is he?” Keira asked, tapping her cheek thoughtfully with a finger.

“He’s about, er, ninety,” Halmatia said. “Er, I think.” As it happened, that was wrong, but he wondered where she’d gotten the information. If it was 1273 then he was 109.

Keira tapped her toe as well, thinking. “I’d have to look it up,” she said. “I don’t-- hmm, no, I think I know enough. The Cat school changed their mutation style sometime in the 1160s or 70s, I think, which it’s said caused the younger generation to have less self-restraint in general, and they fought to take over in the early 1190s, had a big shake-up, and shortly thereafter that led to them being forced out of their keep in the mid-1190s when they started being too aggressive for the tastes of the local nobles.” Her tone had gone into a sort of songsongy-lecture-summary tone Aiden normally only heard from academics, and Halmatia had very obviously begun to tune her out. “So that’s right in the critical period. Though I’m not sure-- Cats are among the ones who I think were prone to a kind of berserker-style rage, which is funny because you’d think it’d be the Bear school that’d do that?” and she laughed, but Halmatia just stared blankly at her. Undeterred, she summed up, tone going snappy, “Anyway, I don’t know that much about it; the exact year he had his mutations done may be crucial to knowing what precisely he’s got.”

This was more information than some mage ought to have about Witchers, and Aiden felt his hand shaking. He’d been in the thick of all of that, and he would have wagered that none of them would have ever told an outsider, but-- well, a lot of his school-siblings had gone missing over the years, and if Halmatia had been interested in such information, she could probably have pulled it from his head.

“Ah,” Halmatia said, tuning back in, “that’s it, that’s the thing he does. It’s absolutely inhuman, he just goes wild. So he must be from after the mutations changed.”

He’d done it out from under the control spells precisely once. She’d managed to contain him somehow, he didn’t know how, and he’d come to in the cage again, and now the control spells kept him from getting too agitated as well. But Halmatia had missed some of the lecture; the berserker thing was original to the Cat mutations. She wasn’t a very good student, but then, he already knew that from literally everything else she’d ever done.

Keira was giving him a calculating look. “It’s a shame you can’t relax the control spells enough for him to talk,” she said. “Do you never get to talk to him? It’s one of my chief uses for mine. I had thought he’d mostly be useful to me for gathering potion ingredients and the like but honestly it’s his company I make the most use of.”

“Ah,” Halmatia said, and Aiden boggled at the thought that she’d apparently made it seem like he was here willingly, somehow? How did she really expect to brazen through that. “I generally can’t when anyone else is around. Sometimes if there’s no one else in the house I can risk it.”

“Come now,” Keira said. “We’re two Aretuza-trained mages. Surely between the two of us we can handle it if a damaged Witcher goes berserk? Anyhow you don’t have to remove the control spells entirely, just relax them a little. I only want to ask him a few questions.”

“Well,” Halmatia said. “It’s really not safe. You know Witchers are very fast.”

Keira laughed. “So are mages,” she said. “Here, watch, I can set up an outer ring of containment spells. You know how to do this! Old Xenaia taught us this in year five.”

“I… didn’t get along with Xenaia,” Halmatia admitted.

Keira gestured, and pulled an item out of thin air, a black stone. “You take your energy focus,” she said, “and you pull out some of the stored power--”

“What is that?” Halmatia asked, looking with some alarm at the black stone. Keira turned her hand, holding it flat so the stone was cradled in her palm.

“An energy focus,” she said. “Come on! Year four. An energy focus or power object: it’s an object you take and meditate with, and you store up chaos in it to access later so that you can do complex workings-- did they stop teaching this?”

Halmatia frowned, shaking her head. “I never was taught that,” she said.

“Ah, I’ll have to give you my notes, then,” Keira said. “How strange! It was a core part of the curriculum when I was there. What year did you finish?”

“I, well,” Halmatia said, “1258.”

“Oh my,” Keira said, and her smile had gone sharp-edged and fixed, her tone a bit brittle despite its brightness. “Well, a lot has probably changed at Aretuza. Perhaps they’ve better methods. How do you power a complex spell so that it can run without your direct input?”

Halmatia stared blankly at her. It sounded to Aiden as though perhaps Aretuza had gone through some hard times. “We did,” Halmatia said slowly, “have stones we… left in the tower, and then later would… bind spells to, but…”

“Ah,” Keira said, “same principle. Doubtless they had other subjects to focus on; there have been all kinds of developments. I suppose I’m old-fashioned,” and she laughed, merrily, but somehow in the middle of it she caught Aiden’s eye and widened her eyes fractionally, as if including him in a side conversation. She raised her arms. “So, I’ll do this my old-fashioned way, and then you can show me your new-fangled control spells. I’ve never built anything that complex, I can tell from here!”

Halmatia still looked hesitant, but Keira gestured decisively, placed the stone in the air in front of her so it hung there as if suspended from a web, and then gestured with both hands, and spoke, her voice fuller than her normal speaking voice.

Aiden flinched, through the control spells; he didn’t need a medallion to know that she was building something, and all his time here with Halmatia had conditioned him fairly thoroughly that spells meant suffering, for him. Air whipped around strangely in the interior space, and he struggled briefly against the control spells in his terror, but they held him; all he could manage was to pant, twitching.

“Let him calm down a moment,” Keira said to Halmatia. “He seems a bit… ah, nervous about magic. You know you have to be careful around Witchers, they’re very sensitive to spells and things.”

“Are they now,” Halmatia said, gazing at Aiden with a look he associated with oncoming torture. He grit his teeth against a wave of helpless terror, letting his gaze go fixed at a point between the two of them. But he saw Keira’s hands, holding her spell, dip slightly, as if she had faltered; surely she could feel that, they both could feel that. Halmatia looked delighted. She really enjoyed his fear, and he normally didn’t give her the satisfaction if he could help it.

But he couldn’t help it, not with two of them and their attention so fixed on him. “All right,” Keira said in a moment. “Now I’ve got my spell stable, and he’s inside it and we’re outside, so you can pull down your control spells and we can try to get an accounting out of him.”

“I’m not sure it’s a good idea,” Halmatia assayed, but Aiden could see that covetous look in her eyes. This was a fantastic way to torture him and she had help, now, she could do more than she could on her own. His terror leached away, giving way to despair.

“Come now,” Keira said, “test my wards yourself, if you like. See the structure? Evaluate them.” And she narrowed her eyes, and suddenly the lines of magical force lit up, visible like beams of light in smoke, surrounding Aiden at a distance of several feet, but stopping short of the two mages.

Except… Aiden squinted, and he could see that lines extended around behind Halmatia too, where she couldn’t see them. The ones between himself and her shimmered, less-substantial. He looked at Keira, who glanced over at him and smiled, quirking one eyebrow.

Wait, was she-- was this--

“He still feels pretty agitated to me,” Halmatia said, which was a good reminder that she was paying very close attention right there. He let her feel his burst of panic at that, and then retreated behind the spells, as if he didn’t want her to take them down.

His heart was pounding. Was this-- was this-- but this other mage was a collector who had Lambert prisoner. She wasn’t doing this for him. She wasn’t going to _help_ him. But maybe, just maybe-- he couldn’t even let himself think it.

“I can tie them into your household wards, too,” Keira said. “I could leave you this structure, when we’re done here, if you like. If I get enough information out of him for my research it would be well worth it. I can even leave you the focus object. Your household wards are so interesting, how can they be so complex without a focus object?”

“I have a warding stone,” Halmatia said. “I buy a new one every year, I’ve a friend who makes them.”

“Ah,” Keira said, and behind Halmatia, Aiden saw a little ball of light go chasing along some invisible line of force. He wondered what that was, but squashed his curiosity and focused on projecting terror toward Halmatia. Keira smiled. “Don’t be so scared, little kitty,” she crooned at him, smiling a sick-sweet smile, and biting her lovely lip flirtatiously, but her eyes were solemn. “I won’t damage you, I just want some information.”

“I made all the traps myself,” Halmatia said, “I just use the stone to power the structure.”

“Oh, of course,” Keira said, and her eyes went indirect as though she were suddenly thinking of something else. “So, now. I think he’s calmed enough for our purposes that he won’t go berserk instantly. You know what causes that, right?”

“No,” Halmatia said. “Where did you get all of this information on Witchers, by the way?”

“I spent several months in their old keep, at Kaer Morhen,” Keira said, almost absently. “The old sword-master Vesemir was quite forthcoming if you plied him with decent Mahakkaman spirit and asked leading questions, but also there were remnants of their old library and they’ve no real concept of warding spells.” She made a tiny twitching gesture; Aiden would have sworn she was having an active conversation with someone else as well, but she was hiding it well. “They’re powerful magic users in their own right but they can only command those cantrips they have, there’s no theoretical underpinning, they can’t structure a new spell or much alter the structures of the ones they cast by rote. Some of them have more facility-- one of the surviving Wolves has very powerful Signs indeed and can casually manipulate their structure far more than is typical-- but my pet only has his little handful of cantrips and a couple of forms for each one, and has no ability to learn more, though I’ve tried to teach him, poor thing.”

“You’ve _tried_ to _teach him magic_?” Halmatia demanded, astonished.

“Why wouldn’t I?” Keira asked, almost idly. “I’ve no fear of him, and he comes and goes as he pleases, but he always comes back to me.”

That didn’t sound like she had him captive, but Aiden wondered where the lie was. Mages lied constantly; this one had to be. She was lying to someone. For whose benefit was the performance?

Halmatia was frowning, but then she turned to regard Aiden with predatory eagerness and he didn’t have to feign his flinch of fear. He hated that he was giving her so much, but-- he knew then that she’d done this before, had looked him over with another mage, and he’d been made to forget it but the ghost of the memory remained. Whatever they’d done, it had been really bad, he was certain, and he supposed he was glad he couldn’t remember.

“So the control spells,” she said, “are my own design, derived in part from Ugarda’s manual but then I kept going and made more layers. I had to put in a lot of failsafes as well; I really don’t want him picking these apart from the inside. I mean, you haven’t _seen_ one of his berserk rages-- if I couldn’t bring him down he’d destroy the entire house. It’s really-- it’s really a lot.”

“Oh,” Keira said, “I’ve no doubt.”

Halmatia held out her hand and with a gesture, started to peel away the outer layer of the control spells. She was focusing intently, and Aiden felt a deeper slip; the layers were clearly interwoven by a complex pattern only she could see. He took a trembling breath but very carefully did not try to move or escape.

As the layers slipped away, Keira shifted her position slightly, as if she were just adjusting her stance for comfort, but in so doing she took several small steps backward. The visible lines of her spell followed her, moving behind Halmatia, and the ones between Halmatia and Aiden now showed a visible gap.

They were false. The lines between Halmatia and Aiden were simple illusions, to fool Halmatia. Aiden understood now: Keira was locking Halmatia in with him. She was looking straight at him, and as he darted his glance from the visible gap in the lines to her face, she nodded, eyes wide, very solemnly.

He didn’t have to feign fear. What could he possibly do? He had no weapons. She would only hurt him more. He was weak now, and surely Keira only wanted to do this so she could-- well he didn’t know. He didn’t know.

What did it matter? If he was doing this only to become Keira’s pet instead, still his heart leapt at the chance to get some kind of revenge on Halmatia. He couldn’t do that kind of long-term planning. The control spells slipped away layer by layer, and his hands were shaking and his knees were weak.

Halmatia laughed nervously. “Oh, he’s upset,” she said, and glanced at the lines in front of her. “This spell of yours had better hold. Well-- if it doesn’t, the household wards will, but-- still. Isn’t he magnificent.”

“He is,” Keira crooned, taking one more step back. She gestured, now, with one hand, and an object shimmered into it, slowly-- she was taking great care to pass it delicately through the household wards, he could tell. It was-- a _sword_ \-- a _silver_ sword--

_his_ silver sword, the one he’d had when he was captured.

He stared at it, and then forced himself to look away. How did she have _the exact sword_ that he’d had on him-- with the runestones-- all present-- but he couldn’t stare at it, Halmatia was listening to him.

“I don’t,” he said, as his mouth was his, and it would be a distraction. “Please, don’t make me--”

“It’s all right,” Halmatia said, with a nasty laugh. “Just be brave for us, pumpkin.”

He let his knees shake, and as the spell let go he let them collapse, so he was on his knees. “Please,” he said, and looked past her, at the sword; he couldn’t feign helpless fear, it was all rage. He was so angry. He was _so_ angry.

“Now, now,” she said. “My friend Keira has some questions for you. Be a good boy for us, won’t you?”

There was one more layer over him, he knew from experience; this one did nothing but prevent him from attacking Halmatia, specifically. If she didn’t take that off, this wouldn’t work. He could get around it, but not before she figured out what he was doing, which would give her time to contain him. He didn’t think Keira knew it was there.

“I just want to know a few things,” Keira said. “You poor thing, you really have had a hard go of it. Does that eye hurt?”

“All the time,” he said. Halmatia had never asked. “If you’re getting her notes on it, make sure you write that part in.”

“It does not!” Halmatia gasped, shocked.

He smiled at her, nastily. “How would you know?” he said. _Oh_ , he was angry.

Keira frowned. “There’s another layer there,” she said. “Something’s still holding him. Is that an old one?”

“Oh, maybe,” Halmatia said, and she was clearly lying. “He can speak freely.”

“Mm, not quite,” Keira said, “it’s holding him pretty deeply. Halmatia, I need _true_ answers, not just answers that don’t attack you. Come on, he can’t hurt you through the household wards anyway.”

“I’m not sure I can get that layer off him,” Halmatia lied. “I put it on him first before I really knew what I was doing.”

“Oh come now,” Keira said. Aiden could smell now that she was nervous and afraid, though her voice held no hint of it. “Don’t you really want to see what he can do? I was thinking we could have him and mine fight, once I’ve got my answers. Haven’t you always wanted to see that? Two Witchers fighting?”

“Oh,” Halmatia said, clearly distracted.

“We could make them do it without armor, too,” Keira went on. “Like boxers, shirtless, see which one can best the other on raw strength and strategy without weapons.” Her voice went a little cajoling. “This one’s all right but mine is _really_ pretty with his shirt off, Halmatia.”

“We can do that anyway,” Halmatia said.

“Not if I can’t get honest answers out of him,” Keira said, voice going harsh and stern. That silver sword was floating next to her, in a spot where her body concealed it from Halmatia’s viewing angle. “That last layer has barbs going all through his consciousness, how am I meant to get any kind of quality reading from that? And I can see it’s recent, don’t think me a fool. Halmatia, you and I have been shaping up to be the best of friends, why would you ruin that with an intrusive failsafe that has two other correctly-distanced failsafes reinforcing it? It’s like they don’t teach experimental design at Aretuza anymore.”

Aiden planted his shaking hands on the floor, looking down at them and remembering how to form Signs. She hadn’t let him use Signs in almost the entire time he’d been here. He reached for the place where that power was, and hit smack into one of the barbs of her last control spell. “Heh,” he said, “that’s what that’s for, it keeps me from accessing Signs.”

“You know I can’t let you have Axli,” Halmatia said.

“ _Axii_ ,” Keira said, “can’t work through my warding spell.” She clucked her tongue. “You’ve got to take that out. Halmatia, half the information I need is that I want to watch how he inevitably attempts to lash out at you.”

That might well be true, Aiden thought, keeping the thought well buried. She could study this. But, well, there was no help for that. Still, if she was going to make him fight Lambert once she had her own control spells on him--

He formed his fingers into an _Yrden_ and pushed, pushed at the control-spell barb impaling his magical ability, willing it away. He could pry it out, maybe. He hadn’t tried, not on this spell; this was a new structure, since the last time he’d tried to resist. He dug in and scrabbled at it, pushing and prying.

“There is information in his attacks,” Halmatia said, “but he spent so much time attacking me when I first had him, I’ve derived most of what I need. I’ll give you my notes.”

“Notes aren’t the same,” Keira said. “I’ve done so much more research on Witchers. Look, do you know the shapes of all the hand-signs? If your notes just say _attempted to cast a cantrip_ , do you know which one? That’s crucial information. Look at his fingers; what is he trying to do?”

_Fuck_. Aiden made a fist. “That’s not fair, he moved,” Halmatia said.

“It was _Aard_ ,” Keira said, “he was going to force you backward into me, hoping to jar me off-balance. He doesn’t understand the ward structure, he can’t see it like we can.”

It was nonsense, and certainty coalesced in his chest; she absolutely had known what he was doing, and was lying to Halmatia about it. He gritted his teeth and wriggled at the barb, feeling the others retract very slightly. Halmatia was dithering.

Keira sighed. “Witcher,” she said, “what’s your name?”

Aiden laughed bitterly. “Homer,” he said. “Or was it Wulfstan? Igor?” He looked up. “-- Ivan?” He said it with the mocking little pause.

The barbs dug in, then pulled slightly farther out. “His name is Hayden,” Halmatia said, annoyed. Aiden rolled his eyes hugely, finding he had the freedom to do so.

Keira tilted her head. “ _Is_ it?”

Aiden laughed again, sitting up. “You don’t even know,” he said, and twisted against the control spell as it caught him. “Oh mistress,” he said, letting the control spell script pour out of his mouth, “wise mistress, kind mistress.”

“See,” Keira said, wrinkling her nose, “that is not an answer I can work with.”

Halmatia sighed, and Aiden let the control spell pull him over, groveling on the floor. “Oh mistress,” he said, “your incomparable beauty is second only to your boundless wisdom.” It was all scripted, it was easier to say it than not to say it, and in that instant, the structure of the spell slipped without the tension of his resistance and he hooked more of himself underneath it, so that as it settled back down he had a little more breathing space.

“See now,” Keira said, “I understand, but this is a bit much. A-- Hayden? Was it Hayden? Or Aiden?” She’d slipped. She shouldn’t know his name. Halmatia might notice that. Aiden gritted his teeth and pushed himself up.

“Like I’m going to tell you anything,” he said, “when you can’t even face me without these claws in me.”

“Fine, fine,” Halmatia said, and the claws pulled out a little farther. Aiden shoved some other-than-physical part of himself underneath so that she couldn’t tighten it back down easily. She knew his tricks, but he knew hers, and he’d been keeping his resistance more subtle lately so she might not really know what he could do.

Keira made a face, fury showing briefly, but composed herself. “There,” she said, sugar-sweet, “isn’t that better? Can’t you tell me your real name, pet? Is it Hayden, really?”

“Aiden,” he growled, so she wouldn’t slip again. “But if you want more than that you have to take the claws all the way out.”

“You’re not in a position to bargain,” Halmatia said.

Aiden had his hand behind himself, and shaped _Yrden_ again. He could pull at his magical power now, but only a trickle could fit out past the control spell’s barb. “No,” he said, “and I know you can just torture me for it, but have you ever considered that information extracted under torture tends to be worthless?” He grinned, showing his teeth. “Why have you thought my name was Hayden for so long? Why did you think I was ninety? And are you sure I’m the School of the Cat?”

“What else would you be?” Halmatia demanded contemptuously.

“There’s a lot of other things I could be,” Aiden said. He pushed, and pushed, and pushed, and there was a crack, some daylight between the control spell and himself. He reached, trying to find Keira’s wards on the other side. If she pulled and he pushed-- well, she’d already be deep in his soul and perfectly-placed to cast her own set of control spells.

But in the interim, Halmatia would be dead, and he wanted that so badly it blotted out a lot of his terror of the aftermath.

Little by little, his magical power was pooling like blood on the near side of the control spell’s barb. He could collect it, suck it up into his active ability, and the shape of his fingers let it trickle into a potential _Yrden_ trap.

“Who was your sword-master?” Keira asked. “Vesemir spoke to me of the School of the Cat, you know. If you _are_ a Cat, I may be able to ask you some more interesting and questions. Aren’t you bored and lonely here? Don’t you want to talk about old times?”

“Everyone I knew is dead,” Aiden said, which was true.

“Vesemir told me of a friend he once had,” she said. “A fellow named Guxart.”

Aiden twitched, and it got him a bit more daylight around the underside of the control spell. “Guxart,” he said.

“Spoke fondly of him,” she said. “Said he was the only good Cat, but then he backtracked, and said all the Cats used to be good. He was rather maudlin by that point.”

Guxart _had_ been good. Aiden clenched his teeth, trying to look stubborn as he mentally heaved at that spell, trying to collect enough power to cast not a basic trap _Yrden_ but a more powerful one that would inflict damage. He wanted to hurt Halmatia, and more crucially, he _needed_ to hurt her if he was going to have enough time to get up and get that sword.

“Of course, Guxart is dead now,” Keira said, “and now Vesemir is dead as well, so. You can see, Halmatia, why I need to interview him.”

“Did you kill Vesemir?” Halmatia asked, astonished to the point of distraction. Aiden wriggled and the drip of power into his slowly-forming Sign increased in speed. He was so angry. He was so angry. But going berserk wouldn’t help; she could wrap him up tight and hold him helpless until the fury drained. No, he had to do this right.

“No, no,” Keira said. “No, I tried to save him-- it was a general of the Wild Hunt that killed him and destroyed most of what was left of Kaer Morhen, you know. That’s how I got my Wolf, I helped in that battle. I saved his life; the Wild Hunt had him cornered.”

“The Wild Hunt,” Halmatia said blankly.

“You know, from all those prophecies?” Keira said. “The time of ice and ash and all that whatnot. It was the Wild Hunt? Have you not kept up on any of-- well, goodness me. The Princess Cirilla was all wound up in it, it’s why she’s set to get the throne once everything is sorted out.”

Aiden kept struggling even as mentally he was floored by all these revelations. “What in the _fuck_ ,” he said. “Listen, my excuse is that I’ve been locked in a basement, but how did _you_ miss all that?”

“I didn’t miss it,” Halmatia said loftily, clearly defensive. Bullshit, she hadn’t been paying attention to a single thing that didn’t directly affect her.

“The Princess Cirilla,” Aiden said. “You mean like… the Wolves’ little brat Ciri.”

“Yes,” Keira said, “she’s grown up into quite an impressive young lady. Very good with a sword. Lambert’s very proud of her. He taught her how to do her eyeliner.”

Aiden had to close his eyes for a moment, and Halmatia laughed. “Eyeliner,” she said.

“Good eyeliner is an important life skill,” Keira said, sounding mildly affronted. “What _are_ they teaching the children these days?”

“Is Lambert your _Witcher_?” Halmatia asked, and that had been another slip. Fuck, she sounded suspicious.

“He is,” Keira said, “my Lamby-kins. He’s ever so clever.” She winked broadly. “And his aesthetic is impeccable.”

“Eyeliner,” Halmatia said, in disgust. “On a _man_. No thank you.”

“He’s not a man,” Keira said, grinning sharply.

Aiden almost lost his grip on the control spell. She knew Lambert well enough that she knew that? She knew-- that was-- He redoubled his assault. Had she invaded his mind to steal that? That was _private_.

“Well, a Witcher could hardly be said to be a man,” Hamatia said, chuckling indulgently. “Though they sure look like them. Maybe we should have them fight naked.”

The memory of a previous such indignity Halmatia had visited upon him gave Aiden the strength he needed to shove the control spell up that crucial little bit farther. It gave way suddenly.

Power flooded into his Sign and he threw the most vicious damaging _Yrden_ he’d ever cast in his life and caught Halmatia, squarely; it passed straight through the false illusory lines of Keira’s wards and snapped around Halmatia and she shrieked.

Crucially, she also lost her grip on the control spell, and Aiden tore free from the last shreds of it, screaming. Keira lost not an instant and threw him the sword.

Halmatia hadn’t figured out what was going on yet. “There’s some kind of backlash,” she cried, wriggling desperately in the grip of the Yrden as it lashed at her.

“Oh no,” Keira said, moving into her field of view. “Hold still! I can get it! I think it ricocheted. Don’t worry, it’s not as bad as it looks!”

Aiden got to his feet, staggered several steps to the left, and shook his head, blinking. The replacement eye had gone briefly dark but came back now, feeding him an oddly clear view of what was going on; his own eye had gone a bit blurry and came back slower. He still had the other end of the _Yrden_ , and twisted it viciously, yanking as much power out of Halmatia as he could. She screamed and writhed.

“Keira!” she shrieked, “it’s getting tighter! What have you done?”

“It’s not what I’ve done,” Keira said. Aiden had his feet now, and stalked toward Halmatia, hefting the sword. He’d been practicing, because she’d compelled him to, and so his muscles were in fine shape for this. His calluses weren’t what they could be, but they’d do. And of course, a silver sword wasn’t ideal for the job, but it sat so neatly in his palm, the heft so familiar. He hefted it again, a test stroke, and then walked up to the edge of the _Yrden_ circle.

Halmatia turned, following the direction of Keira’s gaze. She screamed. “How did he get a sword?”

“It’s his,” Keira said. “A Witcher’s hardly a Witcher without a sword.” The mask was off now, and she grinned.

“What have you done?” Halmatia demanded, turning back to Keira.

“I really haven’t done anything,” Keira said. “Lambert said I should let Aiden take care of things, so I’m going to.”

Aiden let the _Yrden_ ride out as long as he could, inflicting as much damage as he could get it to. An impulse came to him, to make Halmatia beg for her life, to make her have time to be afraid, to carve terror into her the way she had to him. It wasn’t a good impulse, and he could feel himself wavering on the edge of adrenaline-rage. He could give into it, and probably make this other mage have to kill him. That would feel good, while it lasted, and then he wouldn’t feel anything.

The _Yrden_ flickered, on the edge of giving out, and he hefted the sword. “I’m going to leave you in privacy,” Keira said, “since you have it well in hand.”

Aiden glanced over at her in surprise, some of the red fading from around his vision. “What?”

“I think you and she deserve some alone time with no interference,” she said. “I’m going to go help Lambert, who disabled the household wards and has been hacking his way in past the defenses that triggered. I’d like to give him a hand, I think he’s rather hung up on the golem. I’ll send him in when we’re done, and I’m sure he can help you clean up after you’re done in here.”

Aiden stared at her. The _Yrden_ gave a last burst of damage as it gave out, and Halmatia was left sprawling on the floor, badly injured and whimpering as she tried to get to her feet.

“See you in a few,” Keira said cheerfully, and turned and ran lightly out the door.

Aiden blinked at her, then turned back to Halmatia, twirling his sword as he brought it up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Yrden_ is the Sign Witchers use to trap creatures-- usually incorporeal ones, but it can work on physical beings as well. More advanced versions of the Sign, in the video game, can inflict damage on the target, while the basic one only holds the target in place.
> 
> I know, since when do I explain video game stuff?


	3. The Real Question

Lambert just barely got his _Quen_ up in time as the golem landed a thunderous blow. The shield breaking staggered the thing back, and Lambert rolled out of the way, a little dazed; that would have killed him. As it was, it wasn’t great. He could kiss this sword goodbye, he thought, as he managed to land a hard blow; there was no way he was ever gonna get a good edge back on this thing. Fuck.

This fucking mage had an insane number of magical traps and protections on her household wards. He’d started working as soon as Keira had gone inside, scouting the place and finding weaknesses and trying like hell not to set anything off that’d bring a live person running to check it. The breakthrough had been welcome: Keira had sent him information that the wards were tied to a warding stone, and she’d been able to trace the structure and find where the thing was. Once she had the mage surrounded in her own internal ward, right around the same time, then Lambert could get to work bashing his way in to yank the stone out, so they could make a clean escape.

Better that than trying to pick their way out through the wards after killing the mage. Some stuff would disappear when she did, but from the structure, which Keira had analyzed and declared the most dangerous kind of amateur work, it had looked like not all of it would.

Lambert was hoping this golem was in the latter category, because he’d almost been killed twice now fighting it, and the fucking thing wasn’t going down. This was a lot of hazardous work for something that might just go poof once Keira finished her end of the job. But then, maybe he should hope it would, because he wasn’t making much goddamned headway against it.

She was keeping him updated with the magical doohickey she’d had when he’d made his ill-fated attempt to get Aiden’s medallion; she’d been telling him things, clearly using her mental voice, and sometimes she’d been directly showing him things she was seeing. Distractingly, often those things had included Aiden, who was in there, staring blankly around and looking-- like himself, but fucking awful somehow. It was hard to pinpoint just what it was, but something in his vacant stare, the unnatural paleness of his skin, the lack of muscle tone in his facial muscles-- he wasn’t in there, and Lambert had to take Keira’s word for it that really, he was, he was just buried.

Lambert flung an _Aard_ at the golem to buy himself enough space to re-set his own attack, and then leapt up to hit it from above with a flurry of blows. He knew he was fast and strong, augmented by a couple of potions, but the thing still managed to catch him glancingly on his way down and send him flying across the room. He had a lot of practice at being flung across rooms, so he landed well enough, in a roll, but he ran out of room and slammed too hard into a wall and had to scramble madly to evade the next blow.

That hadn’t tickled. Not quite a rib fracture but he was pretty sore. This thing was ludicrously fucking overpowered for what it was. Keira had explained that in recent years, Aretuza had started accepting money to educate young ladies whose families could pay, and rather than… some process she was vague about, that removed unsuitable candidates from the final pool of graduates and put them to use somehow in a less… alive, maybe… way, the school had fallen on hard enough times that it was accepting money to let these unsuitable candidates graduate instead. Halmatia was clearly one of these candidates; she’d never held a court position or any kind of job, lived off family money, and just did mage work as self-amusement, apparently. She’d done some light work for her family, but in the wars they’d all lain low to survive, and she apparently had spent all of the wars holed up in her basement performing hideous experiments.

This golem wasn’t something Halmatia had constructed, she’d purchased it from a more competent mage, or some other source, and it was-- it was _intense_ , was what it was, and Lambert hadn’t come specifically prepared for an overpowered golem, and hadn’t really expected a golem of any kind at all. It was incongruous, out of place with the other household defenses, and actually kind of counterproductive-- they’d wrecked most of the gardens already, just in the brief fight he’d managed so far.

And it was going to kill him. He could hit it a few times, at great effort, and the blows he landed damaged it but not nearly enough. He’d only managed to bring a handful of bombs, and he’d used a couple of them already on the way in, and what he had left-- well, he’d hit the thing square with one of them and it had staggered it but hadn’t done much damage.

He was mostly just running away, now. Maybe he could tire the thing out, but it wasn’t going to help much; he was much more vulnerable to exhaustion than an animated rock monster.

They’d spent weeks setting this up, horrible weeks where he hadn’t been able to think about anything but Aiden being tortured in some basement or other, and he’d begged Keira to let him come along-- he’d even offered to let her put him under magical compulsions so he wouldn’t fuck it up, figuring that way he’d be useful, he’d add credence to her charade of being a fellow-collector like Halmatia, but she’d flatly refused him, and the second time he’d asked she’d vanished and he’d found her crying in her workshop, and he hadn’t asked again. He’d let her be in charge, and done whatever prep-work he could, and that was that. It was killing him, but she was good and she was confident and they were going to succeed.

Except that he might die, right now, so that was inconvenient. The fucking golem was fast and he’d ducked through a small doorway but it had just come around the end of the corridor and re-located him easily, and he was going to fucking die in a moment when he ran out of places to run or ran out of breath to run with. A Tawny Owl potion could only do so much to stave off exhaustion.

Keira nudged him mentally, and he was so distracted he had to answer out loud. “Not going super well with this golem,” he said, out of breath.

 _Aiden’s witty even like this, it’s amazing,_ Keira answered. _Not long now. Hang in there, I can come help you soon. Just stay ahead of it._

“I’m fine,” Lambert said, sprinting down a cross-corridor and leaping frantically to catch a clerestory window, clambering out of reach of the golem. “You do what you’ve got to, yours is the important job.”

_Not long, surel-- ahh! He’s done it! He’s free!_

“Fantastic,” Lambert said. The golem paced back and forth below him, bellowing furiously as it decided how to reach him. In a moment it would remember it could smash walls. He did his frantic best to catch his breath. He should take a Blizzard, increase his relative speed, but he had already done both Tawny Owl and Thunderbolt to get in here and he didn’t want to get so toxic he couldn’t take a Swallow pretty directly for these ribs. But oh, he could try that new Sign instead of the Sw--

The golem started smashing, and he leapt desperately for another windowsill, caught it just long enough to break his fall, dropped to the floor and bolted back down the hallway from the direction he’d come, pelting along at top speed. The golem didn’t waste as much time as he’d hoped but took off right after him, and was just about as fast as he was. That hadn’t worked; he was going to fucking die against this stupid overpowered hunk of rock.

Keira appeared suddenly in a blaze of light as he scrambled down a hallway. “Lambert!” she said. “I need you to get in there!” She paused. “Why are you running?”

“Golem,” he said, skidding around the corner as nimbly as he could manage. Grabbing for her hand slowed him down, and the golem leapt around the corner and brought its fist down in a smashing blow he wasn’t going to be able to--

Keira stepped out of the way and blasted the thing with lightning. It fell in a heap of rubble and she blasted it into a smoking crater. Then she turned to Lambert.

“Come on,” she said, and she looked harried. “I think Aiden’s going to go berserk.”

He grabbed her hand, pausing for only a moment to glance back at the smoking crater. Holy _fuck_ she’d blown that thing away like it was _nothing_.

Well. That was Keira, really, in a nutshell.

She hauled him through a little blip of a portal and they came out in a nicer hallway and she said, “I’m staying out here. Just-- go to him, see if you can’t calm him down, yeah? I’ll take care of the rest of the household wards.”

“I didn’t get the wardstone,” Lambert told her, even though that was probably obvious, and ran in through the door, because if Aiden actually went berserk there wouldn’t be a gods-damned thing he could do but if he got in ahead of the berserker rage maybe they’d live.

Aiden was standing with his silver sword in his hand, and the sword was dripping with blood, and there was a body in front of him. Spell-light sparked around him, the remnants falling away of some containment spell maybe. And he glanced up as Lambert came in, his eyes wide and blank and oh yeah he looked like that terrifying berserker adrenaline rage he got was going to kick in.

“ _Aiden_ ,” Lambert cried, like it was tearing itself out of his chest. He staggered to a halt, then staggered forward.

Aiden blinked at him and some of the terrifying opacity went out of his expression. “ _Lambert_?” he said.

“Aiden,” Lambert said, and took the last few steps forward.

He felt the last of Keira’s wards shred around him, the way they did in the mornings when he got out of bed and wandered around the house. She’d had them keyed to him-- or perhaps, keyed _against_ Halmatia and Aiden.

Aiden’s hands were shaking but he was still holding onto the sword-- Lambert recognized that training, all right. But they could lay their swords down, here: Keira had the door. Aiden’s whole body was shaking and his knees were going, so Lambert sheathed his sword and caught him under the arms and eased him down so they were both kneeling on the floor. Aiden was staring at him through all this as if he weren’t sure he could possibly be real.

Lambert took the sword gently from his hand and laid it down next to them. Aiden’s hands were freezing cold. “L-l-lambert,” Aiden said, just above a whisper.

Lambert put his hands on the sides of Aiden’s face, just looking at him. One of his eyes was strange, flat and opaque and somewhat-- faceted, like it had been carved-- made of stone, perhaps-- but the other was just like it had always been, and was focused on him disbelievingly. His face-- the shape of his face-- his cheekbones-- his jaw-- his hairline-- Lambert hadn’t forgotten any of it but he’d never-- to see him again and to hold his face between his hands and feel that he was alive, his pulse in his temple-- “I thought you were dead,” Lambert said. “I avenged you as dead. I-- if I had thought there was _any chance_ you were alive, Aiden, I _never_ would have rested, I would have--”

Aiden closed his eyes and raised his hands, wrapping them around Lambert’s wrists. He pulled Lambert’s hands away from his face, and wrapped his arms around Lambert’s shoulders instead, pulling them together. “Lambert, Lambert,” he said, “I _was_ dead, I was in hell--”

Lambert realized he was sobbing, which wasn’t how he’d intended for this to go, not that he’d actually imagined this in any kind of detail-- mostly he’d imagined killing Halmatia, vivid fantasies of how he’d make her suffer. But probably that was taken care of, as they were kneeling in blood. He buried his face in the crook of Aiden’s neck and breathed him in. He smelled of misery, terror, fear-sweat and worse, but above and below and beyond all that he smelled unmistakably of himself, of _Aiden_ , which Lambert simultaneously would know anywhere and had already forgotten. His body, the width of his shoulders, the skin of his neck, the planes of his chest, the physical reality of him-- it was overwhelming and Lambert clung to him and sobbed.

Aiden was scenting him, too, breathing harsh and open-mouthed into the hinge of his jaw. “Can we run?” Aiden whispered in a moment. “How far does she let you go?”

“Aiden, we’re safe,” Lambert said. Keira had expressed disgust that she was going to have to pretend to be as monstrous as the mage that had been holding Aiden, and Lambert realized now that Aiden would have seen that, would have watched her being friendly to this monster-- she’d said she’d had to imply that Lambert was her pet similarly, and of course Aiden would believe that. “I’m not her prisoner. We’re allies, she and I. I’m not captive. I can take you and we can go anywhere we want. But she’ll-- she was only pretending, love.”

Aiden was stiff, unmoving in his grasp, and Lambert pulled back just far enough to see his face. “I’m telling the truth,” he said. He cradled Aiden’s cheek in his palm. “We could run, but we’re safer if we stick near her. Keira’s a friend. Your mage was a monster, it’s different.”

Aiden didn’t answer and Lambert was pretty sure it was because he didn’t believe him, not because he was accepting that. He pulled him in close again and kissed the side of his head. “I have you now, I’m not letting go of you again. Do you wanna get out of here? We can get out of here.”

Aiden pulled back, looked at him, and nodded. He looked dazed and terrified but he also looked like himself, his own canny awareness and dark wit. “I could’ve spent about three more hours just cutting her into smaller and smaller pieces but I’m all done, I don’t want to be kneeling in blood anymore,” he said. “Get me the fuck out of this house.”

He was a little steadier as they got up, and retrieved his sword with a solid enough grip. Lambert kept ahold of his other hand-- his hand was freezing, but the size of it, the shape of the fingers, was so familiar, and it might have killed Lambert to let go. Aiden stood a moment staring at the mage’s corpse, which he’d-- well, he’d killed her pretty thoroughly, and it wasn’t pretty, but he also hadn’t mutilated her for mutilation’s sake, he’d kept it pretty direct, just a couple of big sword-blows. He’d half-expected an Aiden teetering on the edge of a berserker adrenaline response to have done a lot more damage.

Lambert had never seen her before. She looked generically like a sorceress. Blonde, unfortunately; vague resemblance to Keira, which was unpleasant to contemplate. She looked young but that didn’t mean anything. He had a moment to be slightly annoyed that she’d obviously died quickly; her blank expression showed nothing so much as startlement.

“Let’s go,” Aiden said, and they went to the door. Lambert peered out cautiously, not just because the wards had been full of horrors but also in case Keira was standing there waiting for him. Could he ask her to keep a low profile? But she’d saved his ass, and she was the only reason this rescue had worked. Aiden’s desire not to be directly under her control was understandable but the longer he let Aiden think maybe Keira was like that the harder it’d be to correct him.

There were no horrors lurking in the hallway, and they made their way carefully to the entrance of the house without much trouble. There were signs of battle all around, scorchmarks from Keira’s lightning and the wreckage of various kinds of constructs. There were a few signs of Lambert’s own rampage through here earlier, too, but he had to admit to himself that he hadn’t done a whole lot of good.

They made it outside and Aiden leaned against him a moment, somewhat overwhelmed. “You’re free,” Lambert said, holding him up. “You’re free, Aiden. And I’ve got you. I won’t let go of you again.”

Aiden laughed, letting Lambert pin him against the wall, putting his arms around him. “Yeah,” he said. “I don’t-- ha. I think we oughtta stick together, at least a while, huh?”

“You ass,” Lambert said, “I’m not letting you out of my sight for at least a solid decade.”

Aiden tipped his head down to rest it against Lambert’s. “Fuck,” he said. “Good.” And he shivered violently all over, just once. Lambert listened to his breathing, and they rested there for a little while. Aiden’s breathing was just loud enough that Lambert could tell from its pattern that he was scenting Lambert, reassuring himself or taking him in or both. But it was the only sign of his distress; he was outwardly calm and subdued.

 _Keira?_ Lambert tried, seeing if she could still hear him.

 _Hey,_ she answered. _I’m, uh. I’m gonna have to spend a while here, I think. There’s-- she was doing a lot of really bad stuff, Lambert. But you should probably get Aiden safely out of here._

 _Yeahhhh_ , Lambert said, drawing it out.

 _He thinks I have you captive_ , she said. _He’s terrified of me and thinks I was stealing him for my own use, not freeing him._

“We have to get out of here,” Aiden said, stirring himself and looking back at the gate they’d come through. “She has horses, we could steal a couple.”

“The place I’ve been staying is up in Kaedwen,” Lambert said. “We came down by portal, I don’t have most of my gear.” _He’s not going to want to go through a portal_ , Lambert thought. _I should have thought of this._

Aiden looked at him. “You trust her that much,” he said.

“Kaer Morhen has been rotten with sorceresses for decades,” Lambert said. “It turns out they’re just like anybody; most of them are assholes, a couple are monsters, a few are pretty decent. This one’s slightly less of an asshole than most, but she’s also pretty decent besides. I found her a place to hide out from the witch-hunters, and she’s saved my life like half a dozen times. I don’t know how to prove to you that I’m not actually under her control, Aiden, but--”

 _I_ did _think of that_ , Keira said. _If you take two of her horses and ride about ten miles, I rented a farmhouse. I rather expected portaling him off to Northern Kaedwen into a house with a magical workshop and all kinds of bizarre ward structures and things in jars and whatnot was not going to be to his taste. The question is whether he’s up for making a ten-mile ride._

“The real question is, can you prove to _yourself_ that you’re not under her control?” Aiden said, grimacing.

Lambert squinted briefly, slightly disoriented by his two simultaneous conversation partners’ uncanny echoing of one another. He understood the question, but how to answer was kind of a puzzler. “Yes,” he said, “I can, is the thing, Aiden.” He sighed. “Listen. I know a place we can go. It’s like ten miles. I don’t think you’re up to going straight out on the Path. For one thing, between the two of us we maybe have one good pair of swords; this one’s in shitty shape because of that golem she had. I have some money but not a ton. You don’t have so much as a change of braies. We’re not getting far.”

“We’ve done all right with worse,” Aiden said, but then he subsided. “Well. And don’t think I didn’t notice you’re limping. You take anything for that?”

“Not yet,” Lambert said, “it’s just a bruise.” _If we run off and leave you here_ , he said, _when you show up again in a few hours he’s going to freak out. You’ve got to come with us_.

 _I have too much to do here_ , she said. _I’ll check in on you later, it’s all right._

 _Nope_ , Lambert said. _Not doing that._ Out loud he said, “But I’m not leaving until Keira’s safely out of there. It was her plan, the whole way, and I’m not leaving her behind here.”

 _Don’t be an ass_ , she said.

 _I have never_ not _been an ass_ , he said. He hadn’t really allowed himself to think beyond the purpose of this mission, hadn’t planned for any future or considered any implications, but he was now. He and Aiden had been together a long time but they’d never been exclusive; even if Aiden _hadn’t_ been presumed dead, he wouldn’t have been angry if Lambert had taken another lover. Lambert was guilty about Keira, sure, but largely because he’d been having good times and drowning his grief in another person’s bed while Aiden had been being tortured. He wasn’t sure how it would look to go on in life with both of these people who were important to him, but he did know that this whole ordeal of rescuing Aiden had only solidified and deepened whatever his feelings were for Keira. So he wasn’t going to just-- throw her aside. But even apart from that, they’d come here together, and he wasn’t going to leave her in a dangerous place without backup.

“You’re worried about the safety of the sorceress,” Aiden clarified, carefully.

“You know better than anybody what a horrorshow it is in there,” Lambert said. “I say we burn the place down and run.”

“You’re not… wrong,” Aiden said. “But I really do want to be certain of this: you’re worried about the safety of the sorceress.”

Put like that, it did sound ludicrous. “It’s not,” Lambert began, and fumbled around for a moment.

“I can take care of myself,” Keira said, and he could tell she’d said it out loud, not just from the quality of the sound but from the way Aiden’s eyes-- or, his eye and the weird blue-green surface of whatever had replaced his other eye-- turned toward her and went even flatter with wariness. Lambert turned. She was standing in the gateway, arms crossed over her chest. She looked flawless and he could tell it was an illusion.

“I’m sure you can take care of yourself,” Lambert said, planting his hands on his hips to give her a look up and down, “that’s why you’ve got a layer of illusion on about four inches thick, with last year’s hairstyle wedged on top of it.”

She put her hand up to her hair, startled, and then put her nose up, pretending haughtiness. “Like you remember my hairstyle from last year,” she scoffed.

“It has the flippy bit,” Lambert said. “I told you the flippy bit looked dumb and you had this wavy thing instead for a while but then you stopped doing illusions and I lost track. But this is definitely the old hairstyle.” He stepped away from Aiden enough to grab her hand and look at it. “You’re not covering up blisters at all, right?” he said, and brushed his thumb firmly over the tips of her fingers.

“ _Ow_ ,” she shrieked, and snatched her hand away. She often blistered her fingers if she used her lightning at full power, which she’d absolutely done on that golem, and healing it took a lot more focus than illusions did. She had so much practice with illusions sometimes she’d cast them in her sleep; once in a while he’d fall asleep next to her looking normal and wake up with her sporting full court makeup. He’d gotten used to it, somewhat.

“Yeah,” Lambert laughed, “you can take care of yourself just fine. You don’t need me at all.”

“I _certainly_ don’t need you to poke my blisters,” she said, bristling. “I can do that all on my own, you absolute savage. Look, she’s got easily half a dozen decent-quality horses here, you can take your pick. Here’s the route to the house.” He could tell it was an illusion to make it look like she was taking the scrap of paper from her pocket; she’d really conjured that from somewhere.

He took it and grabbed her hand, and she very clearly let him, rolling her eyes, and dispelled the illusion-- just the illusion on her hand, though: last year’s hair stayed firmly in place. Her hand was quite badly blistered and she’d bruised her knuckles badly enough to split them in one place. “Punching things is _my_ job,” he said, putting on an aggrieved tone.

“In this specific case, retrieving Aiden was your job,” she corrected him. He gazed at her, eyebrows raised, and she sighed, averted her gaze slightly, and admitted, more quietly, “I hit a wall because I was upset. It’s fine, I didn’t even break any bones this time.”

“Upset,” he said. He was keenly aware that Aiden was standing behind him in a state of extreme tension.

“She was a _monster_ ,” Keira said, “there are _horrible_ things all through this house.”

“And,” Lambert prompted. Keira wouldn’t be that upset just by that.

She clenched her jaw hard enough that he could see the muscles flex through the illusion. “It’s people like this that made the witch-hunters so powerful,” she said, as if it were being torn out of her. “And all my friends are dead and this monster was alive and torturing people, and _all my friends are dead_ , Lambert, are you happy? That’s what I’m upset about. Are we done? Can you go, already, and let me finish my salvage-work here?” She yanked her hand out of his grasp and turned and walked back through the gate.

Lambert looked at Aiden, raising his eyebrows. Aiden looked unimpressed, but he also looked less terrified than a moment before. Probably that hadn’t been enough to really convince him, but it had been enough to get him to reconsider.

That was sort of why their relationship had worked so well for so long; Aiden was generally willing to entertain Lambert’s wilder notions.

Aiden sighed. “How many times has she won arguments with you?”

Lambert laughed. “Never,” he said, and drew his sword in his right hand and took Aiden’s hand in his left. Aiden rolled his eyes, and came with him through the gate.

* * *

Aiden managed to hold himself mostly together through the process of stealing the two nicest horses out of Halmatia’s stables. He had a bad moment where he checked out while saddling the horse and then found himself pressing against the edges of the control spells and then panicked when he couldn’t find them, and he wasn’t sure how long he spent grayed-out with panic in the corner of the stall before he came back to himself with Lambert holding him and rocking like he was a child. That was unpleasant, but passed quickly enough. He couldn’t explain himself but Lambert didn’t ask him to.

He knew he wasn’t hallucinating, as that wasn’t something he was prone to, and he’d had some vivid daydreams but never ones that included scent. Lambert smelled too realistic-- he smelled of himself but he also smelled of that strange sorceress. Not strongly, but intimately, like he’d washed his clothes in the same tub with hers. They’d been traveling together, or staying together, and Aiden just wasn’t together enough to figure out if they were fucking, or begin to put together what that meant.

Somewhere deep down a part of his sense of humor was working rather hard on cobbling together some sort of joke. Keira was a sarcastic blonde who seemed to tolerate Lambert’s bullshit with fond amusement, which-- Aiden was generally a self-aware person, and knew fine well he could likely be described in a similar fashion down to the coloring. Lambert wasn’t a person who generally sought out a lot of sexual partners, to put it mildly, so if he was fucking Keira, there was a joke to be made about him having a type. And it would be hilarious. But Aiden could not put it together. He couldn’t get himself together enough to speak. It was normally Lambert’s turn to go silent, for his torrent of commentary to fail him under stresses both good and bad, but Aiden’s mouth was so used to being held shut now he couldn’t remember how to open it.

And he couldn’t-- he just couldn’t believe, deep down, that Keira wasn’t truly the face she’d shown Halmatia, smooth surface and no human depths and casual cruelty, making light jokes about forcing Lambert and Aiden to fight for their amusement.

So he let his tongue lie silent and kept his head down as they rode for a couple of hours. Lambert had said he wouldn’t leave without the sorceress, but they’d clearly been having some sort of discussion that Aiden couldn’t hear-- though he had a suspicion that in his current state there was likely a lot passing over his head that he just couldn’t keep up with. He was on the edge of self-control, barely holding himself together. At any rate, the sorceress was not joining them but apparently would later, and Aiden wasn’t thinking about that.

Lambert kept looking at him, and Aiden couldn’t look back at him, even though it was all he wanted to do. Finally they came to a village, and Lambert said, “Do you think you could be up to getting something to eat in a tavern while the horses take a break?”

Aiden focused all his attention for a moment on his own hands on the horse’s reins. “I-- genuinely don’t know,” he admitted in a moment. His eye was sending spikes of pain through his skull; it was always worse after he’d been outdoors in bright light, and now it was bad enough that he was having trouble concentrating and his hands were shaking. He’d been ignoring it. Maybe going inside would help. He’d been absently trying to keep the eyelid on that side closed, but it didn’t seem to be helping.

Lambert dismounted and came over and took his hand, and eventually Aiden realized Lambert wanted him to get down too, so he did. Lambert gathered him gently into an embrace, and Aiden let him, waiting to be directed somewhere or other. After a little while he realized Lambert wasn’t trying to get him to do anything, he was just holding him, now, and-- okay, that did-- that helped. His scent and warmth and physical presence and alive-ness all helped, and Aiden pressed his face down against the side of Lambert’s head and closed his eyes, letting the pain from his eye ease away a bit. He just breathed, for a while, and eventually he could breathe more easily.

“You got a handkerchief?” Aiden asked. He hadn’t bothered checking his own pockets. He had none of his own things, none of his little knives, bits of string, spare buckles, none of the things that kept a working Witcher alive and functional on the road.

“Yeah,” Lambert said, letting go of him and patting himself down. He pulled one out, frowned at it-- it quite clearly had old blood on it-- said “I know I got a clean one,” stuffed it back in whatever pocket it had come from, and then pulled one out of the inside of his gambeson. He frowned dubiously at that one as well, then handed it over with a shrug.

It smelled of Lambert’s body and did not smell of recent washing but it also didn’t have any kind of active visible filth on it, so Aiden figured it was the best possibility present. He carefully re-folded it and tied it around his head to hold his bad eye closed. Not perfect, because pressure on the lid worsened the irritation of the not-completely-smooth surface of whatever the fuck object Halmatia had shoved into his skull, but it kept the light from bothering him.

“Bugging you that much?” Lambert said quietly, frowning.

“Yeah,” Aiden said.

“I might have something that’ll fix that,” Lambert said.

“I have no idea how potions will affect it,” Aiden said. “I haven’t taken any in-- however the fuck long--” He shuddered. “Is it really 1273?”

“Yeah,” Lambert said quietly.

“Fuck,” Aiden said. He closed both eyes. “No, don’t tell me what I missed yet. I got a few snippets and I know it’s going to be a lot to take in.”

Lambert pulled him close again and held him a moment longer, and then he heard Lambert’s stomach growl, and laughed weakly. “At least you look all right,” he said, spreading his fingers to probe at Lambert’s body through the open front of his gambeson. Lambert was at his early-spring weight, right enough, with all his muscles filled-out with the winter’s labors and covered over nicely with a thin sleekening layer of fat.

“I’ve done okay,” Lambert said, subdued, as Aiden’s hand slid around the side of his ribs. “I--”

“Good,” Aiden said softly.

“I have a headache cure that doesn’t involve a potion,” Lambert said.

Aiden looked at him for a long moment, contemplating what that could mean. “Something from your mage?” he asked. Lambert nodded. “Mm, it doesn’t hurt that badly.”

“It works, though,” Lambert said. “I’ve tested it.”

“We can save it for if this bandage doesn’t help,” Aiden said.

Lambert looked at him for a moment, unconvinced. “Let’s try the tavern,” Aiden said, tugging Lambert in close and kissing his forehead. His body had forgotten the once-automatic motion of it, and his mouth landed halfway above Lambert’s hairline. His hair oil smelled familiar but subtly different, and either he’d changed it or the ingredients had changed availability.

Lambert stayed close for a moment after Aiden let go, then raised his face and looked up at Aiden, solemn and concerned and mostly unlike himself. He adjusted the way the improvised half-blindfold lay, smoothing it out against Aiden’s cheekbone, and then nodded. “Let’s,” he said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i don't think there were any warnings I should've put in this chapter that weren't things already in the other chapters. lmk if i missed anything. for some reason i'm just not feeling super-competent today! i work in a retail-adjacent position and we've been in Christmas Crunch for about a month now and i still don't have my own holiday shit taken care of because _none of it feels real_ and it seems that's kind of a widespread issue this year so like, _fuck_ , take care of yourselves guys.  
> I'm fine, and will be fine, but my gosh, it's real hard not to be able to be there for anybody, and not to have anybody who can be there for me, and I'm just-- I'm locked up in a comfy house with my best friend and all my material wants met and it's fucking _terrible_ , oh my gosh!  
> Let's find some joy this weekend. Here, in the meantime, is me mushing Aiden and Lambert's faces together, in the gentlest and most G-rated part of this whole story, ha.
> 
> Incidentally, I wrote a draft where Aiden and Keira collaborated to horribly murder Halmatia, and I found myself skipping writing paragraphs of it, and finally I was like... no. First I moved it offscreen-- sure Keira hates this bitch but she's seen enough witches tortured to death in the last year or so, she is absolutely not going to want to watch-- and then the more I thought about it, the less I wanted it at all. We have enough horrible gory violence, and the more I know of Aiden, the less I think he would actually find that redemptive or cathartic. I'm getting to know this dude as I write ahead and he's-- he's a funny guy, he's a light-hearted guy, he's a keen observationalist and surprisingly gentle when he's not, you know, doing that particular bit of what he does for a living, and he's also just-- he's a professional. He's not going to torture anyone no matter the provocation. He's just going to get shit done and move on with his life as best he can.   
> So, that's how this character's taking shape for me, anyway. And maybe that's how I'm getting through this.  
> (Alas, I just poked through the next parts I'm still editing and it's another like 8k words until we get to a sex scene. sorry guys. it's coming tho. heh heh heh.)


	4. How Detrimental Pain Is

Keira eventually gathered herself together and got up from the floor of Halmatia’s horrible dungeon. She’d found several little caches of personal effects, clearly belongings of people Halmatia had kept captive. One had probably been an elf, from the design of some of the objects, but there was no trace of such a person now. There had been probably a standard human as well, some kind of soldier or mercenary, from the quality and type of the personal effects; the trace of him that likely remained was a human skull, well-polished and set on a shelf with, horribly, gemstones in the eye sockets. 

Aiden’s belongings were identifiable as such because of the assortment of potion bottles, the battered leather of the bag, the sturdiness of it-- it was all very similar in character to the type of thing Lambert carried. And, crucially, Keira recognized the handiwork of some of the lacing-- Lambert made fingerloop braids just like that, and in fact had at least one identical one among his gear, holding bundles together. Not just similar but the same colors in the same arrangement. He had very clearly given a skein of it to Aiden at some point. Or-- she looked closer. It was, perhaps, a two-person design, probably they’d made it together and split it among themselves. 

Well, she didn’t need more confirmation of their lengthy and deep mutual history, that wasn’t really necessary. She had the picture of it fairly clear in her mind at this point. 

Halmatia had tortured a number of sentients to death, in this fucking dungeon. Keira had been too late to save all but a scant handful of them. One was a half-maddened sylvan who’d refused her help except to request a “transport spell” back home. She’d opened him a portal and he’d dived through it as fast as he could go. There’d been an incubus, as well, subdued and starved, and she’d given him one of the beads off her necklace to find out if he could use the energy in it and had discovered, to both of their delight, that it worked. She’d portaled him back to his hometown, but not before getting as much information as he could give about how he’d been captured. The last thing anybody needed was someone doing a trade in exotic sapients. 

Keira was exhausted and rather battered at this point, having sprung every magical trap in Halmatia’s wards; she’d been too furious by the end to bother being careful about it, and had brute-forced her way through most of them in a fury. She’d also been slightly disappointed to discover that Aiden had killed Halmatia relatively quickly and professionally; the sorceress’s body had been neatly more or less quartered, and he’d clearly hit her with a bit more force and a bit more often than he’d needed to, but he didn’t look to have drawn it out at all. A shame, but, also a good sign that Aiden wasn’t entirely broken by her. He’d killed her like a Witcher, really. 

Good for him. Keira wanted to resurrect her to make her suffer, but that was rather beyond the pale on many many levels, so she did not. 

She found Halmatia’s cache of mostly-exhausted warding stones, and piled them all together to suck out the last of the chaos still in them. Bullshit they didn’t teach this at Aretuza anymore; clearly Halmatia had gone into it knowing they’d let her through no matter what because of her parents’ money, and so hadn’t applied herself to any lessons she didn’t care for and thus had left Aretuza not knowing how to create a focus object or do any of her own magical scut-work. Not surprising, then, that she hadn’t managed to land any prestigious positions… but, likely, that had saved her life from the Eternal Flame and other fanatics, as well as keeping her safely out of political upheaval. All of the talented young women from Aretuza were dead. Everyone whose career Keira had followed with interest, everyone she’d made a point of meeting and offering kind advice, everyone she’d cared about. All were dead. And only monsters like this remained.

She’d cried about it for a bit, injured and exhausted and heartsick, but she was done with it now. She tucked away everything she’d salvaged into various hold-all containers, and schlepped them through a portal to the house in Kaedwen to analyze later, and then she came back and piled up the trash over Halmatia’s corpse, and set the whole thing alight. 

She made it out of the house just in time, and threw herself through a portal to the place she’d told Lambert to go before she could think better of her destination. Some of the explosion from Halmatia’s lab going up came through after her, and she stumbled into the mud in an undignified fashion.

Lambert came tearing out the door of the farmhouse, and she looked up at him, then struggled to her feet and cast a hasty illusion to hide the filth and damage on her.

“Are you all right?” he asked, steadying her. 

“Fine,” she said, still furious. “Gods, _fuck_ that woman.”

“What happened?” he asked, alarmed. 

“An explosion,” Keira said, wiping her battered, muddy hands off on her overskirt. The illusion should cover that, no problem. She was a horrid mess but she didn’t have to stay here long, she was just here to see that they were safe. “Obviously you both made it here?”

“Yeah,” Lambert said. “I was just thinking about heading back to find you, I thought you’d be here waiting for us.”

“I was fine,” she said crossly, “that would have been stupid.”

“Mm,” Lambert said, skeptical, and she remembered then that of course he’d be able to smell the filth and terror and all of it, regardless of illusions. 

Well, no help for it. “Aiden’s all right?” she said. “A five-hour ride did him good?”

“He’s,” Lambert said, and hesitated. “His eye,” he said quieter. “He had to put a blindfold on. It was really bothering him.”

“No wonder,” Keira said, and she was so tired, she was so very tired, but she was going to have to deal with that. “Gods, he killed that woman too quickly.” She sighed, and rubbed her own eyes. “Did you try a _Cura_?”

“No,” Lambert admitted. “I don’t exactly know how to explain it.” 

If he didn’t let Lambert cast a cantrip on him, he wasn’t going to want Keira to do it, but there was little help for it. She didn’t blame Lambert for not wanting to let on how close the pair of them had gotten over this winter. It shouldn’t sting, to contemplate; she ruthlessly squashed the part of her that was hurt by it. It was a long time since anyone had been ashamed by her-- pre-Aretuza, at least, and she’d assumed the part of her that remembered it was dead, but by the current pang in her guts, clearly not.

Lambert took her elbow as though she were some sort of invalid, but she was too tired to fight him off, and let him lead her in the door. Belatedly she thought that her illusions making her look like her normal self, dressed-up, were probably not what she really wanted for this audience, but it was too late to change to something else.

The room was dim, and Aiden was sitting in the corner; his eye caught a flash of the light as she came in, and his eyeshine was greener than Lambert’s. “Keira made it,” Lambert said. 

“Good,” Aiden said, flat and neutral, so much so it bordered on hostile. Or, very tired, Keira allowed; it might just be that he was very tired. 

“She needs to look at your eye,” Lambert said. 

“I should wash my hands first,” Keira said, realizing belatedly that an illusion over a layer of dried mud over blisters was not the way to start out a medical examination. 

She came to Aiden with her hands and face washed, her illusions toned down, and he moved closer to the lamp and turned his face up to her obediently and with unmistakable deeply tamped-down terror.

She wanted to tell him she’d never hurt him, but he wouldn’t believe it, so it would serve no purpose. So instead she examined him with as clinical a touch as she could manage, cool and detached and disinterested, and Lambert stood out of her light and watched anxiously. 

“I’ve read of this technique,” she said, “it was invented by Vilgefortz of Roggeveen, and he improved upon it later-- and lately it has been improved even further by Philippa Eilheart, who had both eyes put out by Radovid V of Redania. I haven’t seen her in some time but I’ve spoken to her at a remove, and I’d heard she had achieved good eye function. She’s tough but I don’t think she’d put up with constant pain, which is what you said you had, yes?”

“Yes,” Aiden said, and he sounded just like he had under the control spells. She didn’t know how to convince him that he didn’t have to act like that.

“It looks as though a large part of the discomfort is that the object itself is not as smooth as an eyeball would be,” she said. “I’ll make up a solution you can irrigate with-- I mean, wash it, frequently, it will rinse out grit and irritants-- and I also can apply a spell that will block the pain, though I would advise caution, as the lack of pain could lead you to cause yourself unwitting damage, since you can’t feel it. But, pain is itself harmful and can lead to any number of bad outcomes apart from any other considerations.”

“That’s true,” Lambert said, “toughing it out never works.”

Aiden made a very faint noise of protest at that, which Keira realized was him reacting to Lambert, not her.

“As if you’ve _ever_ sought timely medical treatment,” Keira said to Lambert. 

“I’m not the one hiding blistered fingers right this moment,” Lambert said. 

“That’s hardly fair,” Keira said, astonished and betrayed. She’d thought she was hiding them better than that. She’d given no sign, it had to be a guess.

“I _knew_ you hadn’t healed them from before,” Lambert said. “Keira!”

Oh. It had been a guess. He had seen them earlier, after all. “I’m fine,” she said, irritated at her own stupidity. “I’ll fix them once I’m back in my workshop. I’ll have to go there and get some supplies to-- well, I can make up the solution here. Lambert, can you put a kettle on to boil? I’m sure there’s one in the house.”

“There is,” Lambert said. 

“Did you ever take anything for the ribs?” Aiden asked mildly. Too mildly; he was needling Lambert. 

“No, because they aren’t broken,” Lambert shot back from across the room.

“Did I or did I not _just_ finish explaining how detrimental pain is,” Keira said absently, very gently holding Aiden’s eyelid back as she examined the hazy crystalline surface of the artificial eyeball, “and did you or did you not _just this moment_ agree with me--”

“There’s toughing something out,” Lambert said, “and there’s weighing the cost versus the benefits to your purse and your liver.”

Keira rolled her eyes, and gently let go of Aiden’s eyelid, watching how the replacement eye moved in connection with his other one. His real eye’s iris was yellow like Lambert’s, but a little more greenish; his pupil seemed to behave like Lambert’s as well. He was quite pretty, with even, regular features, a bit sharp for current fashion but generally well-balanced. She’d have given him a second look even without any of the other factors that had drawn her attention. She couldn’t blame Lambert one bit for having his head turned, though she knew well with Lambert it was almost never really a physical attraction that pulled him in. No; it was almost certainly the dry wit that was tentatively surfacing through the terror, here, and perhaps the worst part-- no, definitely the second-worst part-- was that it was working on her as well. The _worst_ part was that she was causing the terror, and there was nothing she could usefully do about it. 

“I recommend that you treat your injury, Lambert,” Keira said, “but I leave it to your judgement whether rest or medication or a cantrip is preferred.” She winked conspiratorially at Aiden, who didn’t react visibly, and then released his face and stepped politely back. He really needed her to give him some space, and she wanted to, but she also didn’t want him to suffer. She was going to have to cast a spell directly onto his face, and she didn’t even have to contemplate it to understand that he was going to hate that. 

And, of course, she was going to need help dealing with this. She did not herself have enough expertise to do much of anything about this. She could make him comfortable, but she rather thought he was not going to want her hanging around constantly casting little spells on his face, but rather was going to want a functional eye with no ongoing maintenance necessary. But, she should ask him.

He was watching her, quiet and wary and nonconfrontational. It made her chest hurt; she wanted him to be able to feel safe, and he couldn’t do that with her present. He was trying to be inconspicuous and not attract her attention, and she didn’t think he knew he was doing it, but she could hear how studiously blank his mind was, in contrast to the constant low mutter of Lambert’s that she rarely bothered dipping into. (She was only looking now to confirm her suspicion, anyway.)

“Well,” she said. “I’ll get that solution made up, show you how best to rinse it, and then I’ll cast the charm that’ll stop it from hurting for a while. I have a number of errands to run tomorrow, and I don’t know if I’ll be able to come back to follow up, but if I can’t I’ll make arrangements.” It was an awkward hitch in her plans, actually; she didn’t know if she could get anything lined up soon enough that he wouldn’t have to wait a long time from her spell wearing off until the next source of relief. 

Lambert might have to get out his new Sign and explain himself. In fact, it wasn’t a _might_ ; he was _going_ to have to do it.

Keira’s most important errand didn’t have a well-defined time frame. She’d have to cast some conditional spells. And she-- instinct urged her to call on Yennefer for backup, since this was a matter of Geralt’s family, but she wasn’t that close to her. She was closer to Triss, who wasn’t uninvolved in Witcher business in general. No, it would probably be reasonable to set up a conditional spell to contact Triss if she didn’t return from her errands.

“Wait, you mean you don’t know if you’ll be back tomorrow,” Lambert asked, far too astutely, “or at all?”

“I mean tomorrow,” she said, “but-- well there’s always a chance of something going amiss, so--”

“Hang on,” Lambert said, crossing his arms over his chest and strolling with exaggeratedly casual movements back over to stand next to her. “What fucking errands do you have that you might not come back from? What the fuck is _that_ about?”

“Melitele’s pity, Lambert, I’m not saying I’m going to be _killed_. I’m saying, though, I might wind up detained. I have several things to do and one of them involves talking to Philippa Eilheart, you never know what _she’ll_ do. I may have to run off instantly on some mad quest for her and be gone a fortnight in exchange for the secret of how she does those eye gemstones, you never know.” Keira waved a hand vaguely, and instantly regretted it as Aiden’s attention snapped warily to it. She put her hands back down and clasped them behind her back. “At any rate, if that’s the case, I’ll need to set something up, that’s all. I don’t want Aiden suffering the entire time I’m gone.”

“I’ll be fine,” Aiden said quietly. “It’s been-- however long it’s been. I’ll just stay out of bright light if it’s bothering me. It’s really fine.”

It wasn’t, she could tell that, but there was no point arguing. She let the water boil for a couple of minutes, then measured it carefully into a clean cup and stirred in a precise amount of salt. Then she cast a charm to immediately cool the whole thing to room temperature, and tasted it, just to be sure. 

“I’ll leave you the recipe,” she said, and handed the cup to Lambert. “Just stand over a basin, and… maybe use a spoon or a ladle so you don’t just wind up dumping it everywhere… but if you just sort of rinse the whole affected eye out, it ought to help.”

She got out of the way, and Aiden cautiously went to the basin, and he and Lambert worked it out between the two of them, with some very quiet muttered commentary that Keira realized was intentionally being conducted below the threshold of her hearing. She hadn’t really thought about it but of course Witchers could do that. Now, she could easily pluck the conversation from their heads, but she wasn’t about to do that, so she let it go. Instead she busied herself coming up with her conditional spells, working through the logic of them but not casting any of them yet. 

“Better?” she asked, looking up at Aiden as he came back to the table, shaking his head like a cat whose ear was stuck inside out. 

“Yeah,” he said, a bit uncertainly, off-balance. She gestured, and he sat instantly, obedient, which made her regret the gesture. Maybe she should just sit on her hands whenever she was around him. 

“So,” she said, since Lambert wasn’t going to bring it up. “This is a very simple spell against pain. I don’t want to cast anything complex on you, given what’s-- given what’s happened, and all. But I will point out that Lambert also has learned a simple healing cantrip that he has tested on himself and could probably demonstrate for you by casting it on that cracked rib of his that he’s pretending not to feel. He could cast that and it would likely do even more good than what I’m about to do.”

Aiden glanced over at Lambert blankly. “A what,” he said.

“I learned a new Sign,” Lambert said, clearly steeling himself to explain.

Aiden’s eyes widened slightly. “You,” he said. “ _How_?”

“I can explain it later,” Lambert said. 

“It just seems to me that you might prefer that,” Keira said, “rather than having me casting spells directly onto your face. Given what you’ve been through.” She made a tiny little gesture, somewhat in Lambert’s direction, but a nothing of a gesture, simply turning her hand thumb-first so that the palm faced up, and Aiden’s eyes snapped to it with sharp precision, then after a moment, his eyes went to hers where she’d been watching his reaction, and his expression went from wary to resigned.

“Don’t take it personally, ma’am,” he said.

“I’m not taking it personally,” she said, as warm and sympathetic as she could manage. “I don’t blame you one bit. She was a _monster_.” She tilted her head toward Lambert. “Come on. Show him what you can do.”

Lambert gave her a look that might have been resentful, which wasn’t at all fair, but then he formed his fingers into the circular shape for _Cura_ , and cast it on himself. Aiden startled backward in his chair, clearly horrified and alarmed, but when nothing happened, he returned cautiously to his former posture.

“I told you it wasn’t broken,” Lambert said sullenly, prodding at his own ribs far more aggressively than necessary. 

“But it feels better now, yes?” Keira said sweetly, tilting her head a little. She could tell it did; his shoulders had gone looser and he wasn’t holding himself against it so much.

Lambert gave her a disgusted look and flipped her off, and then came and knocked his shoulder against hers. “Give me your hands,” he said.

“What,” she said, and he took both of her hands in his, and she realized he wanted to see the blisters. “No,” she said, “you don’t-- ugh. Fine.” She let the illusions go, and he made a face at her fingers. 

“This is worse than at Kaer Morhen,” he said.

“Leave off,” she said. “I’ll fix it. It’s not worse than at Kaer Morhen. Save your energy, you’ll need it while I’m gone.”

His warm thumb traced carefully along the edge of the bruising on the knuckles of her right hand. She could feel him shaping the cantrip in his mind, using the guide she’d tethered to the bracelet. “At least use the focus object,” she said. 

He gave her a look, rolled his eyes slightly, and drew from the focus object, then cast a _Cura_ on her hands. She could feel how deftly he controlled it, and realized that with all his experience at Signs he was probably a better spellcaster than she was. Well, it stood to reason; he was operating within narrower parameters than she ever got to, and had been honing his skills within those narrow parameters for several decades. 

She closed her eyes as it washed through her, tingling almost unpleasantly, but in a moment she flexed her fingers and the blisters and bruising were gone. One of the bones of her hand had been cracked, she realized, from the fading burn of the healing. She caught his wrist as he let go, and held onto the bracelet she’d given him for a moment, pulling trapped chaos from one of her necklace beads to top off the power in the focus object attached to the bracelet. 

She wasn’t sure if he’d be able to tell what she was doing, but he gave her a look. “I rather think you need that more than I do,” he said. 

She shook her head. “Now ask him,” she said, tilting her chin toward Aiden, since she knew by now not to gesture with her hand. 

Lambert let go of her hands, and she took them back and crossed them over her ribs, trying not to think about how big and warm his hands were and how badly she wanted him to take her face between his hands and look down into her face and-- 

She broke off the thought, shaking her head slightly and watching as he stood in front of Aiden. “I promise,” Lambert said, almost too quietly for her to hear, but he wasn’t talking to her. 

The Sign washed gently over Aiden’s face, and he twitched and gasped a little; he was trying to keep his eyes open but the lids fluttered down for a moment, and then he opened his eyes slowly and looked up at Lambert with an expression of wonder that Kiera had to turn her head to make herself look away from. This wasn’t-- that wasn’t for her. None of this was for her. 

She wanted to just slip away, but she had to make sure it had worked. She waited a moment, then looked over, and Lambert glanced up at her. “I think it worked,” he said. “Did it work, love?”

Aiden took a shaky breath, and looked up at her. Both of his eyes were watering, probably from having dumped salt water in one of them a moment ago, but it gave him a beautifully vulnerable aspect. He really was terribly pretty. “It, it worked,” he said, a bit unevenly, and it struck her, possibly because she could hear it coming off him in waves, that he’d probably been in constant pain so long that not being in pain at all was doing a real number on him. 

She bowed slightly, smiling. “Then I am not needed, and will take my leave,” she said. 

Lambert followed her out the door, and she paused, looking back at him. “You’re leaving now?” he said. As if he hadn’t expected her to. 

It wasn’t a small house, really; there were two bedrooms, plus a spare bedstead set up in the large common room, partitioned off in its own cabinet in the old style. He was assuming she’d stay there with them. She hadn’t ever planned to. She supposed she hadn’t discussed it with him at all, hadn’t discussed any of it. She hadn’t really let herself think it through very much, but did he just assume she was going to want to hang around like a spare glove while they paired off? It wasn’t like Lambert would ever need to fuck her again, since he had the man he loved back, and what else did they really have?

“Well,” she said, “yes,” and then wasn’t sure how to begin with the rest. Fortunately, Aiden was an easy topic. “Every time I move my hand he expects-- reasonably!-- that I’m going to hurt him,” she said quietly, knowing he could probably hear her.

“How’s he going to get used to you if you run off?” Lambert asked. 

“He can get used to me in small doses,” Keira said. “It’s more important that he gets to feel safe just for a little while, don’t you think?” She sighed at his expression, which was dubious. “The house is well-stocked with everything I could think of, I’ll swing by the neighbor’s and tell her to check in on you every other day or so-- I’m renting it from her-- and it’s paid up through spring. I’ll be back tomorrow, probably, and if I’m delayed I’ll send word via Triss. Don’t make that face, I know you get along fine with Triss.”

“I do,” Lambert conceded, “but I don’t have to like it.”

“She’s the closest thing to a friend I have left,” Keira said, trying not to sound bitter. “Don’t be mean to her.” He looked like he wanted to say something, but she pressed on, not wanting to hear whatever it was. “I just have to take care of a few things, and anyway someone’s got to feed Lil Bleater or she’ll make a break for it, you know how she is. I’ll see you tomorrow or the day after, or maybe next week if Philippa decides to be annoying.”

“You told me it was a terrible idea to owe her favors,” Lambert said.

“I did,” Keira admitted. “Well, this is what I meant. She’s possibly going to be reasonable, and possibly she’s going to be incredibly irritating. I just don’t know.”

“Don’t go to her, then,” Lambert said.

Keira shook her head. “She’s the world’s expert in that gemstone eye technique,” she said. “I’d be a fool not to ask her. And don’t think it wouldn’t get back to her that I hadn’t asked her, and that would possibly be an even worse disaster. You can’t show fear, you know?”

“No,” he said thoughtfully. “You can’t.”

His tone of voice had gone a little odd; he was working something out, likely, and Keira supposed it was unlikely to affect her. She stepped off the doorstep, and Lambert followed her another pace, catching at her arm. “Wait,” he said. 

She turned back again. “Wait for what?” she said. 

“I,” he said, fumblingly, and he clearly didn’t know what else to say. “You--” Keira felt as if a deep well of weariness had opened beneath her feet, a kind of sinkhole of exhaustion. Had he only just realized-- well, it stood to reason he hadn’t really been banking on them being successful, hadn’t really been making _plans_ about-- 

It didn’t help all that much to know he hadn’t really considered that he was likely going to dump her, now that the love of his life was returned to him. And probably he was going to feel guilty about it, since she’d been so helpful. Fuck, she didn’t need his fucking _pity_. 

She smiled sweetly at him, and patted his face. “It’s all right, sweetheart,” she said. “Go and make sure he’s all right. I’ll check on you later.”

She was going to have to be the one who walked away, was the thing, and she hadn’t really thought about it that way, but that was how it had to be. So she did, and called up a portal before he could say anything, and it took all of her self-discipline, but she didn’t look back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ayy we'll be here with a sequel in no time, no fear.
> 
> * * *
> 
> hey so I looked at my stats by year on AO3 and this year's in fourth place for number of words posted, which honestly is lower than I'd expected. wacky. I'm going to bump it up to third or second though by the end of the year, because I have a bunch of material mostly ready and I am sure I can do it.  
> What's interesting is that this wasn't anywhere near my biggest year for hits? but it was for kudos and comment threads, so thanks guys, you're champs. I appreciate you a lot.
> 
> * * *
> 
> Also I've just had a Terrible Family Event and I need some distraction so I am possibly going to be a posting fiend and possibly going to just not be online and who knows which way it will go! Please talk amongst yourselves and I'll join in if I can make that work out. Either way know that comment notifications come to my phone and I read them voraciously regardless of what else is happening in my life.

**Author's Note:**

> ah and if you didn't notice, i made a nested lil series just for the later-timeline Lambert/Keira post-W3 stuff. just wanted to keep them separate, i have some updates for the main MDS series as well and figured it'd be good to be able to separate the chronologies.


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